Doing it with a pro

A couple of weeks ago my friend Dottie suggested I stop into a storefront on 8th Street, the Village Alliance.  They were going to do Village walks and it sounded like something I would be interested in.  Every Saturday  from 5/28/11 to 9/24/11 one of three different guides will be taking people on a walking tour of 8th Street.  Not throughout the village just 8th Street.  Today it was Michael Morrows' turn.  Each tour guide takes a different point of view.  Michael describes his tour as dry and factual.  He recommended Jane Marx's tour to me.  He described her as a very funny Rosalind Russell type, who focuses on the women who lived in the area.
Mr. Morrows is quite good.  He had a "cheat sheet" with him which he referenced every once in a while but for the most part he talked extemporaneously.  He seemed to know all about the Architects, politicians, artists, and all the dates and places they lived and hung out.  Two new pieces of info for me.  Among the Georgian red brick buildings on St. Mark's Place between 2nd. Ave. and the Bowery is the last home of Alexander Hamilton's widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton.

Today it's a unique clothing store very popular with Lady Gaga, according to Mr. Morrows.  Who has actually turned out to be very accurate.  I try to vet my sources.  I love that expression, vet.  Especially when it's being done to politicians.
The second thing I learned on my tour:  "I heard it through the grapevine" is a saying that originated in the Village at a bar called "the Grapevine".  It was located at Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, directly across from the old courthouse. In the early to mid 19th Century it was the hangout for artists, politicians, lawyers, judges, union officers and southern spies.  After a couple of drinks there would be some loose lips and so the tavern was the source for a lot of juicy info.

Galleries

Yesterday was one of those great NYC days, bright, cool and breezy.  The perfect day to look at some bright, cool and breezy art.  First to see is the show that Frank has curated at the Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Drive.  It's near The Riverside Church, on the upper west side.
The exhibit is Frank Mann's "Oculus".  He "explores the act of seeing and depicts the circularity of life."
The "loose circular orb-like structures depict life's flow"
"The inner processes of the eye is externalized so that what the artist presents is open ended.  Starting with the light of the eyes, the images are transformed in the back of the retina and then interpreted in the visual cortex in the back of the brain."

I picked up the NYC gallery guide at the Interchurch Center and checked out some Galleries to see in Chelsea.  Top of my list was the Gagosian.  Sunday Morning on CBS did a piece on their installation: "Picasso and Marie-Therese: L'amour fou."   Picasso's M.- T. was his lover and is considered "the primary inspiration for Picasso's most daring aesthetic experiments in the decade to come."  The most striking thing in the exhibition for me is how the most "aesthetic experiments" of Picasso so truly capture what we see of Marie-Therese in the photos at the exhibition.
But there are others I can show you.

Then to 530 West 25th street, Viridian Artists exhibit of Robert Mielenhausen's "Rome"

I love it when an artist makes me smile.  I thought he was real at first.

Candidates for Hare's Test

"Basta Bunga Bunga", a letter from Italy by Ariel Levy in the current New Yorker.  It is about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and whether Italians have had enough of him and the culture he embodies.  Is it just an Italian billionaire's culture or endemic to our world?  Berlusconi has a number of TV shows and a number of young, buxom, inexperienced women from his TV shows are given important government posts.  The author describes some Berlusconi shows. This is one of  them: "Scherzi a Parte," a woman in her underpants hangs from a meat hook alongside hundreds of hams as a man in a butchers costume stamps a sell-by date on her behind."
When the author suggests that she meet with the Prime Minister for an interview, Berlusconi's close friend advises her that she would first need plastic surgery to roughen up her looks so then the Prime minister would keep his hands to himself.   
Again in the article: "Until 1981, 'a crime of honor' that is killing your wife for being unfaithful or your sister for having premarital sex could be treated as a lesser offense than other murders; as late as 2007 a man in Palermo was sentenced to just 2 days in jail for murdering his wife after his children testified that she had been disrespectful to him". 
In a related news, NYC Hotel Maids in two hotels that have recently been in the news will now be allowed to wear an intercom buzzer in case while visiting a guest, especially French billionaires, in their room they need "back-up".
From the Tao:

Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don't see the self as self,
what do we have to fear?

See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.   

Ghost Bike

On highways around the country you will see crucifixes on the side of the road to mark the death of a loved one in a motoring accident.  Around the city we have these bicycles, ghost bikes, usually painted white and decked out with flowers to mark the spot where someone lost their life while cycling in the city.  I haven't seen anything yet to mark the spot for someone who lost their life while walking around the city, but when I was working at Bellevue Hospital I did see some people who were hit by cars, taxis and even buses while trying to cross the street.  There is this notorious street on Queens Boulevard where many people have been injured and some lost their lives trying to get to the other side.

Painting Urbanism

I came upon some interesting chairs just parked on the sidewalk at Delancey and Mulberry Streets in Nolita.  They were in front of Haas&Hahn's Painting Urbanism installation: "Learning from Rio".  So I went in and took a look
The first image I saw looked like a view of Manhattan from Queens with buildings that have been painted.  So I went in and visited the storefront of Art and Architecture "a nonprofit organization committed to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art and design".

The installation was by Haas & Hahn @ www.favelapainting.com    They are the artistic duo of Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn who conceived Favela painting in 2005.  Favelas are the name of Brazil's shanty towns.  They began in the late 18th century as the home of freed black slaves.  Favelas have become infamous as one of the worlds most dangerous slums.  They have been the setting of a number of Brazilian movies, most notably "City of God".  That's the movie about teenagers living in favelas where the only character that gets out alive is the pet chicken.
Now what do an artist and an architect do to create change?
They gave them tools to create something of their own.  Something to be proud of.

The young men of the favela took a staircase and added some fish.

They kept doing more and more

They painted the town.

From the brochure of the Storefront for Art and Architecture:
"Haas&Hahn have been able to generate a body of work that grows from the formal intricacies, legal conditions and social dynamics inherent to slums and produce a method of action that would hardly be able to be envisioned within the normative spaces of western models of urbanization."

Sara Delano Roosevelt Park

 It is located south of Houston, north of Canal, east of Forsyth and west of Chrystie, and runs for 7 blocks.

I never thought that one day I would be able to walk through this park.  Now, I can spend a beautiful holiday weekend sitting in a lush garden after watching a soccer game.  Years age it was not the place you would ever think of taking the kids or even Fido.  But like a great many places in this city it has changed for the better and keeps changing.  It was named after FDR's mother, and was built in 1934.  It has a Senior Center, turf Soccer field, roller skating rink, basketball, handball, and bocce courts.  It also has a garden with a rooster that cock-a-doodles all day.

The bocce court is inside the M'Finda Kalunga Garden, which translated means "the garden at the edge of the other side of the world".  It is named after the African-American burial ground that was located on Chrystie  between Rivington and Stanton Streets.  The first African slaves were brought to NY by the Dutch in the early 1500s.  By 1748 African-Americans were 20% of the city's population and so this land was given to them for a burial ground in 1794.  As the city grew the graves were moved.

 a book of poems a jug of wine and me!

The garden was founded in 1983 as a "beachhead against the overwhelming drug problem in the park"  Thank you to the Community Coalition that created the park and to the 20 volunteers who maintain it.

House of Worship

Our Lady Of Pompeii Church was built in 1926 by the Italian American community of the South Village and is located at the intersection of Carmine and Bleecker Streets.  This is the third site for the church founded in 1892 by Rev Pietro Bandini of the Missionaries of St. Charles, or Scalabrinians.  The Missionaries were founded by Bishop Scalabrini of Piacenza, Italy in 1887 to care for the Italian Immigrants who were migrating to the "New World".  Along with the missionaries he sent Mother Cabrini who worked at the church for awhile.  Because the Italians in New York were outnumbered by the Irish within the Catholic church their communities built their own houses of worship.  Besides Our Lady Of Pompeii they also built St. Anthony of Padua in the south village.  Well known in the area is Father Demo who worked at the church for 35 years and was pastor at the time of the "shirtwaist factory fire".  Many of his parishioners perished in the fire and so he worked to change the conditions in the city's factories.

And from today's Times a different Sunday sermon; the political take on the Golden Rule.
In an article about the unlikely power duo of Mayor Bloomberg and former President Clinton joining forces for a greener planet it is reported that Bloomberg's financing of an organization that Clinton founded has gotten him chairmanship of the organization.  One of Clinton's staffers said "'What are we going to do, fight him?  They have the money; the golden rule applies.'  As in, he who has the gold, rules."

Dinner and a movie

I had dinner with my good friend Angela at Souen.  Souen is a great vegan macrobiotic restaurant that has recently moved to East 6th Street.  The menu is filled with interesting choices like cauliflower couscous, cauliflower cut and cooked to mimic couscous, edamame guacamole with seitan chips, and my favorite the macrobiotic plate steamed veggies and rice.

The restaurant is in the middle of about 10 Indian restaurants.  I think it was some time in the 1980's that East 6 Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues became the place for Indian Food.

the street is nothing special; your typical East Village tenement block.   Most of the restaurants are on the ground floor with a couple of them up the stairs on the first floor.  Many have music on the weekends.  Since the restaurants have moved into the neighborhood an amazing supermarket has also taken up residence 

It's a little place, smaller than my apartment, but it carries a lot of stuff!

on and on.
The movie was "Win Win" with Paul Giamatti, Bobby Cannavale, and Amy Ryan.  It is written and directed by Thomas McCarthy.  Mr. McCarthy besides also acting in over 37 TV shows and movies has written and directed 2 other very fine movies: "The Station Agent" and The "Visitor".   He was nominated for an Academy Award for writing the screenplay to the animated film "Up".  According to Wikipedia he is also a silent partner in the Papaya Dog chain of fast food restaurants in Manhattan.  He's 46 and I hope he keeps them coming, the movies.  They didn't have hotdogs at Souen.

The Normal Heart

Larry Kramer's play is in an exceptionally fine revival and I saw it yesterday.  Ellen Barkin and Jim Parsons  make their Broadway debut.  Ms. Barkin plays a Doctor who works with AIDS patients and tries to get her patients, the press and government to do something about what is happening to gay men in NYC in 1982.  They are dying and no one knows why. The main character is Ned Weeks who meets the doctor when accompanying his friend for a check up.  The friend has AIDS.  Ned Weeks is a strident, argumentative, angry gay man who becomes one of the founders of an AIDS relief organization and an AIDS political action group.  He is played by Joe Mantello in what must be one of the most exhausting performances in the theater.  He is extraordinary; the entire cast is but he is center stage most of the time. On the street after the play the ushers handed out a letter from Larry Kramer. He wants everyone to know that the crisis is not over and that a lot more has to be done.  He also mentions in the letter that people in the play represent real people and now many of them are dead from Aids or suicide.  Mr. Kramer appears to be much like the character Ned Weeks.
Larry Kramer is a strident, argumentative, gay man who was one of the founders of GMHC and ACT UP.  Almost 30 years later and he is still angry and feels the need to tell everyone what they should be doing.  Because:
After 30 years, with millions of deaths and still many millions of people infected not a single country has categorized this disease as an epidemic.  The government funding for research is still not sufficient.  The cost of medications keeps many infected people from getting the help they need.
In the play Mr Kramer juxtaposes the reporting of the Tylenol crisis in October 1982, with the lack of attention to the Aids Crisis.
The Tylenol Crisis:
Seven people in Chicago died after taking Tylenol that was laced with poison; one of them was a 12 year old child.  Laws regulating the packaging of over the counter medications were passed by the federal government, immediately.  The Tylenol crisis was news for months, over 40 front page stories in the Times.  
AIDS:
In March, 1981 eight gay men in NYC developed an aggressive form of Kaposi Sarcoma and others came down with a virulent form of pneumonia., PCP.  No mention in the press.  In December, 1981 IV drug users were getting PCP and outbreaks were reported to health departments in the UK.  Not front page news, maybe a note on page 26.  Mr. Kramer is getting angry.  Gay men are getting scared.  By July, 1982 there were 452 reported cases from 23 States.  Not front page news.  Then Haitians and Hemophiliacs were developing PCP.  PCP was usually treated with a particular medication and 10 days on the medication and the patient was cured.  When clinics and doctors started asking for refills in 1981 the Health Department took notice and started keeping records.  Not front page news.  Two months after the Tylenol Crisis in December 1982 a child who had received multiple transfusions developed the disease.  The safety of the national blood supply became front page news.
As of 2009:
26,000 people in North America have died from Aids.
Worldwide, about 30 million people have died from AIDS.
New cases of AIDS are being reported all over the world all the time.
Did I mention "The Normal Heart" had me sobbing?

Genius

"I have nothing to declare except my Genius" was Oscar Wilde's answer to a US Customs Agent.
I saw "The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People" yesterday and I enjoyed it so much I may go back.  It was first performed in 1895, and is considered his best work and one of the best farcical comedies of all time.  Opening night was Wilde's greatest triumph but also the beginning of his end.
The Marquess of Queensberry had planned to disrupt the performance because of his son's involvement with Wilde.  The Marquess was stopped that night, but they all soon ended up in court.  Wilde sued Queensberry for libel because Queensberry's note was addressed to Oscar Wilde "posing as a sodomite".  Wilde won a token amount in damages.  But because of what came out at the first trial, Wilde was then tried for Gross Indecency With Men and convicted to 2 years of hard labor.   Because of the scandal the play closed after 87 performances.

Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell stars in and directs the play.  Lady Bracknell is a hyper sensitive aristocrat who will not hear of any social impropriety.  She's that elderly relative some of us know who just when you're having a good time says "enough".
Lady Bracknell:
"Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon.  Only people who can't get into it do that."
"I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.  Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit, touch it and the bloom is gone ... Fortunately in England ... education produces no effect whatsoever."
"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune: to lose two looks like carelessness."
He is remarkable in the role.  He\She says some of the funniest, farcical lines ever written and does it in perfect aristocratic seriousness.  At certain points his voice goes down several octaves in expressions of disapproval.  I would go back just to hear him say "enough", very, very low.  I was impressed by how realistic the characters were  in spite of having to act empty headed and silly while speaking some wonderful truths.  This is a classic 3 Act Play with 2 fifteen minute intermissions, almost 3 hours long, and you don't want it to end.

Santino Fontana plays Algernon, witty and fey:
" The essence of romance is uncertainty".
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
"All women become like their mother.  That is their tragedy.  No man does, and that is his."  
David Furr [I last saw him in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe with Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin]  plays John Worthing.  It is the straight role and he plays it beautifully.  At times forceful with Algernon, then romantic with Gwedolen, then  solicitous with Lady Bracknell.  He has the central role, the connection between these people and he as much as anyone makes the play work.
Other lines:
"If you are not long I will wait for you all my life."
One character says about her 3 volume novel: 
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means."
Oscar Wilde never wrote another play.
He died in 1900 in Paris, destitute, at 46.  He left a wife and 2 sons who changed their names when he was incarcerated.
His epitaph is from his great poem the Ballad of Reading Goal:
"And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn."
One web site had 23 pages of Oscar Wilde quotes.  I'll end with this very long one from De Profundis:
    "When first I was put in prison some people told me to try and forget who I was.  It was ruinous advice.  It is only by realizing who I am that I have found comfort of any kind.  Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all.  I know that would be equally fatal.  It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else - the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy.  To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development.  To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life.  It is no less than a denial of the soul."

How many psychopaths can you name?

Jon Stewart on Monday's show had the author of "The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry".  He is Jon Ronson who also wrote "The Men Who Stare at Goats".  He uses the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.  It assigns a score of 0 if an item doesn't apply, 1 if it applies somewhat, and 2 if it fully applies.  Some of the items are: superficial charm, grandiosity, need for stimulation, pathological lying, cunning and manipulation, lack of remorse, callousness, poor behavior control, impulsivity, denial, and failure to accept responsibility.  Ronson has found that many political and business leaders pass the test and meet the criteria for being psychopaths.  Ronson is a witty man and I'm sure some of what he says is tongue in cheek but not all of it.  The one personal lesson he found from his research is that he could not be a psychopath; he's too anxious.  Psychopaths don't get anxious.  Housing bubble, what housing bubble?

Just down from St. Mark's

There are two buildings on 2nd Ave. between 9th Street and St. Mark's Place.  They are: The Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library and the Stuyvesant Polyclinic.
They were built by the architect William Schickel, 1850-1907, in the German round-arched neo-Romanesque style.  They were completed in 1884 using brick and terracotta.  He also built the church of St.Ignatius Loyola on Park Ave. and 84th Street and many other buildings throughout N. Y. State.  Both of these buildings are listed on the National register of Historic Places.  "The American Institute of Architects Guide to New York City" calls them "an architectural confection."

At the time of their construction there were 150,000 German immigrants in the east village also called Kleindeutschland or Little Germany.

The Library opened in 1884 and was the first branch of the NY Free Circulating Library.   It is the oldest in the NY Library system.
The Clinic provided free medical care to residents of the east village and also training for medical students.  It was originally called The German Poliklinik but had to change its name because of anti-German sentiment during the First World War.
The Library is named for Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer.
Anna Behr was born of a poor family in Germany in 1815 and immigrated to the States in 1837.  Her first husband, Jacob Uhl, purchased the "New Yorker Staats-Zeitung" in 1845, a small German language weekly.  With Anna's help it became a daily in 1852, the year Jacob died.  In 1859 Anna married her editor Oswald Ottendorfer.  She was the mother of six children with Jacob, none with Oswald.  She was the owner and publisher of The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and was very successful.  Her estate at the time of her death was $3,000,000.  In the 1870s the circulation of the paper was equal to The New York Tribune and The New York Times.
A word about The Tribune.  It was  founded by Horace Greeley in 1841, the 'go west young man' Horace Greeley, and was considered the leading newspaper in the United States.  Greeley's foreign corespondent in Europe between 1851 and 1861 was Karl Marx. That Karl Marx.
Anna on the other hand was building what she felt was needed to uplift "both the body and mind of fellow Germans in the United States".  Besides these buildings she built the Isabella Home for Aged Woman [named after her deceased daughter] a woman's wing at a city hospital, and numerous other kinds of aid to German citizens.  So much so that she received a gold medal  from Empress Augusta of Germany, and a plaque in the east village on an "architectural confection" that is landmarked for history.  When she died her funeral was the largest for any woman in New York at that time.  

House of Worship

St. Mark's in the Bowery

It is the oldest site of continuous worship in NYC and the second oldest Church in Manhattan.  It is on the National Register of Historic Places and a registered NYC Landmark.  Formally the place of Peter Stuyvesant's Chapel and cemetery it was donated by his Grandson to be used as a site for a House of Worship.  It was built in 1795 as an Episcopal Church.  Although Peter Stuyvesant was a  member of the Dutch Reformed Church, St. Mark's was for the money and propertied classes, the plutocrats of NYC.  Almost all of it's members in it's first 25 years were slave owners.

The area around the church remained in the control of the Stuyvesant family for a number of years.  By the 1840's  Second Ave. was the most desirable address in NYC with houses costing as much as $40,000.  As the city grew and immigrants increased the government was pressured to find space for industrial storage and housing.  Speculators moved in and the area became NYC's first industrialized ghetto.
Many of the immigrants were German and had been inspired by the revolution of 1848.  Fifty Countries were involved both in Europe and Latin America.  It was over by 1851 and the only real achievement was the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary. Karl Marx published his "Communist Manifesto" in 1848.

When there was an economic slump in 1874 the Cabinetmakers Union, Cigarmakers Union, the German Free Trade Association and Socialists demonstrated in Tompkins Square Park to petition the government for more public works projects.  They were jailed.  There have been many protests in the area since and many people jailed.  Revolutionary ideas and activism have been a part of the East Village and St. Mark's for over a century. 

War Horse

Lincoln Center is doing the National Theater of Great Britain's production of War Horse and I saw it on Tuesday.  I enjoyed it while I was in the theater, but the more I thought about it afterwards the less I cared for it. 
It's very "stirring".  It has a  large cast, with life size, life like puppets standing in for the horses.  The puppets are manipulated by at least three people that I could see; there may have been more at different times.  The puppet masters make the horse sounds and gestures needed at different points in the story and they use different sounds and gestures as appropriate to the story.
The play is about Albert, who is 16, and his horse Joey.  Albert's father is an alcoholic and sells Joey for 100 pounds to the Calvary at the start of the First World War.  Albert joins the Army to find Joey and after much battlefield action the two meet again and return home at the end of the war.  That is pretty much it.  It is  dramatic in a Perils of Pauline sort of way.  There are those moments when you think this is the end for Joey, but he goes on.  His companion in the war is Topthorn, a beautiful black stud.  Topthorn gets killed but Joey goes on.  I hope I'm not negating all the great work that people do to recreate the war on the stage.  It is excellent work.  The audience loved it.
One million English Horses were taken to France, 62,000 returned.  Barbed wire, machine guns, and tanks killed 8 million horses and 10 million soldiers.  The U. S. had 300,000 casualties.
I've read "The Guns of August", "All Quiet on The Western Front", "Johnny Got His Gun", "Birdy".
I've seen "Paths of Glory", "Breaker Morant" and the movie of "All Quiet on The Western Front".
I also saw "Journey's End", a play from 1928 by R. C. Sheriff when it was revived on Broadway in 2007.  It starred Hugh Darcy and Boyd Gaines.  It was wonderful.  Among the best things I've ever seen on a stage.   
War Horse is a sentimental entertainment.  The subject demands more.
I'm off to the L I Q store.  Let me explain.  I had this client in Brownsville, Brooklyn when I was at Model Cities.  After I brought the "teen group" I was working with home she stopped me and asked if I would drive her to the L I Q store.  I didn't know what she was talking about but she directed me to a liquor store that was missing the last 3 letters on its neon sign.  Pure poetry!  As he says in "Elling", a really good movie, she was "talking in pictures".

 
   

House of Worship

On East 2nd Street between 2nd Ave. and 1st Ave. is The Cathedral of Holy Virgin Protection Orthodox Church in America.  Orthodoxy came to America over the Bering Strait in the 19th Century.  It moved down to the lower 48 with it's home base in San Francisco.  In 1917 with the turmoil in Russia many immigrants came to New York and New York became the seat of Orthodoxy.  The Cathedral is the center for the Greek, Russian, Serbian, Antiochian, Ukrainian, Carpatho Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian Orthodox churches of America in the metropolitan New York area.

It was built in 1867 by Josiah Cady, a well respected architect who founded the firm Cady, Berg & See, and worked on the American Museum of Natural History, The original Metropolitan Opera House, demolished in 1967 and many other great buildings in and around New York.  But I don't think he added this?

                                                                   A neon crucifix
The church is across the street from the NY Marble Cemetery.  So the sign doesn't keep anybody up at night.

The Bowery

The name comes from the Dutch for farm.  It is the oldest thoroughfare on Manhattan Island, initially a footpath for the native Lenape.  As the city grew the Bowery was an early suburb for the affluent.  Visit the Merchant House Museum on 4th Street just west of the Bowery.
But by the time of the Civil war it was known for entertainment halls, German beer Gardens, brothels and flop houses.  Among the first gangs of New York were the Bowery Boys and it got so notorious that the area was one of the first to attract social reformers.  The Bowery Mission opened in 1873  is still in operation.  
In the "Gay  Nineties" the Bowery became the place for numerous Gay and Lesbian Bars.  Between the 1940's and the 1970's it was New York's "Skid Row" and the home to a new class of men labeled "The Bowery Bum".
Berenice Abbott took photos of that time.  She worked for the Federal Art Project between 1935 and1938. The photos are available on line through the New York Public Library, thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts.  There is also a great movie about the guys living on the Bowery called "On the Bowery".  Made in 1957 it stars the men and women who lived there. 

That is the Bowery I knew.  I worked at the Men's Shelter from 1973 until 1976 as a caseworker and  group worker.  The organization was called the Manhattan Bowery Project.  At that time people who were publicly intoxicated were sent to jail to "sleep it off".  MBP was set up to be a more humane form of intervention.  At MBP we had a van that went out on the street each day and if a man needed a doctor or wanted to get sober they were brought back to our facility. The men knew the van and our program by the time I was working there, and the guys in really bad shape would be brought by their buddies to the van.  Most of the men lived in flop houses but some lived on the street.
It was my job along with  other caseworkers, nurses, a doctor and a psychiatrist to intervene during their four day stay, and encourage some form of long term treatment.  We had some resources that we could offer.  They, of course, weren't Betty Ford clinics, but some guys took the opportunity and got off the Bowery.  Years later you might see them again but most of the time you never knew if it took.
Two men I remember particularly because of their medical condition and their frequent admissions.  One had a hernia the size of a football and the other had part of his skull removed.  Neither one could stay sober long enough to get the treatment they needed.  The street was a killer.
I learned while working there that wet brain is called Wernicker-Korsakoff syndrome.  It causes memory loss and ataxia, a wide gait also known as "drunken sailor's gait".  I learned not to take the elevator because lice can get on your clothes; watch your back climbing the four flights of stairs because you could get two black eyes as one of the nurses did; or get jumped from behind and mugged as I was. 

                                     I also worked at the Kenton Hotel, a men's shelter on the Bowery.  It is also known as the Kenton flop house.  The big building next to it is The Bowery Hotel , very much the new Bowery.  A flop house was an open space like a loft that had plywood partitions to make a 10 foot by 6 foot "living space".  Then they put chicken wire over the top as a roof and for access to fresh air; what there was of it.  I think we had 160 cots on 3 floors.  The men had to check out every day so the place could be cleaned and then we had to check them in every night.  I'd report the number of empty beds to the main office and they would fill them up with guys who needed a bed and shower.  The bathrooms and showers were communal and that was where the fights took place.  Sometimes lovers quarrels.  Sometimes they'd be "letting off steam", "collecting payment", etc..  While I was at the Kenton the city courts found New York City in violation of the law  because of over crowding at Riker's Island prison.  They released many from Rikers Island and sent them to the flop houses.  It says something about flop houses that some didn't show up and the ones that did were known to us.
I also learned that I could find an affordable apartment in the East Village and I did.  It was on Mott Street between Bleecker and Houston, $200 a month about a week's pay.  Then it was called Little Italy; now it's called Nolita.  My first apartment in Manhattan a five flight walk up, 2 rooms, bars on the windows and only broken into twice.  An affordable apartment in NYC had other costs.
The Bowery today has multi-million dollar condos, a new art museum, and "fine dining" by world renowned chefs like Daniel Boulud.  The NY Times and the East Villager note that when Avalon Bay Communities opened their first luxury apartment complex in 2006 with a Whole Foods Market on the Bowery gentrification had arrived.  I thought it happened earlier, but it was definitely after the 1970's when I moved here.

Lemons into lemonade

Today the plan was to take the express bus to the Bronx and meet my friend Marion and have lunch at a favorite spot of hers in Bronxville.  Got there at 7:50 for the 8:15 bus.  A sign said because of the Sikh Festival on Madison Avenue the buses where on Park Avenue.  There were no signs for buses on Park Avenue   I knew, deep inside, from experience, that there would be no bus on Park Avenue.  Did I mention my 16 years of Catholic school and my Irish catholic immigrant parents.  I love them; may they rest in peace;  we did what we were told.  So I waited until 8:45 for a bus that I knew wasn't coming.
So I went to the festival and had a great time.  It is the Sikh tradition, once a year, to feed others, and that's what the festival was: tables of free food.  Lovely, pleasant, happy people sharing what the have.
                                     
                                                        In Madison Square Park
                                                                 

                                                                                         

And lastly this:  a lovingly remembered N.Y. street presence.  It takes me back to all the times my Mom and I would go downtown to buy my school clothes.  We'd walk and walk, maybe have a bite at the automat, but we'd always keep our eye on the "big clock".  So we'd get home in time for dinner.  Not a lot of working class people had wristwatches in the 1940's and early 50's and there were big clocks all around the city.
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History Lesson

Saw "The Conspirator" last night.  Directed by Robert Redford with a great cast:
James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Kevin Klein, Tom Wilkinson and one of my favorites
Colm Meaney.  Colm Meany is the star of two great Stephen Frears movies "The Van" and "The Snapper".
Last night the movie house had about ten people.  I don't know why it's not getting an audience; I enjoyed it.  It's well done and has some suspense.  The scenes of  an imagined 1865 Washington, D.C. were excellent.  Although, I don't know how accurate the scenes of Washington are, nor how accurate the story.  My strongest feeling after viewing the movie was regret and anger at the edited/proscribed American History I was taught.
As I remember it, I had eight years of American History in grade school, and two in High School.  I do not recall hearing, reading or being taught any of what I saw in this movie about the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination.   I was taught that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln; then jumped onto the stage at the Ford Theater injuring his leg.  We were even taught the name of the play.   This movie is about Mary Surratt, who I had never heard about.  According to the movie she ran a boarding house that Wilkes visited.  The film shows that her son conspired with Booth to kidnap Lincoln and when that failed he may have joined in the assassination plot.  The son was acquitted by a jury of his peers, both northerners and southerners.  He didn't have a military trial.  Mary Surratt did and was convicted and hanged.
Mary Surratt was the first woman hanged by the United States.

From the Tao:
When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe.

Angels on East Third Street

There is a building on East 3rd Street with a lot of history that starts with Dorothy Day.
Dorothy Day, 11/8/1897 - 11/29/1980, was born in Brooklyn.  She was a college graduate who read and was influenced by Upton Sinclair, Jack London, William Haywood, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, and Carlo Tresca.  Her father had been a journalist and after she graduated from the University of Illinois she went to work for the "New York Call" and then "The Masses", both socialist newspapers.  In 1916 she interviewed Leon Trotsky who was living in exile in the east village.  Where else would he stay?
"The Masses" supported  pacifism during the first world war and because of that they lost their mailing privileges and went out of business.  Day supported and worked for Woman's Suffrage, the unionization of workers and non-violence.  When her job at "The Masses" ended she started to attend Catholic services: "the church of the poor".  She has written a number of books that tell what brought her to Socialism and Catholicism.  There are many things to motivate people.  It might be greed, fame, power, or sex.  But to sustain a commitment to the poor throughout her life of service seems superhuman.  She says it came from her political influences.
Her family was from Tennessee and her father was a product of the Jim Crow South.
Her friends were socialists and anarchists.  The father of her out of wedlock child Tamar was the anarchist Foster Batterham who left her when she had Tamar baptized.  Then in the 1930s she met Peter Maurin, a Christian Brother.  Together on 5/1/ 1933 they began "The Catholic Worker" in order to publicize Catholic social teaching.  In 1936 there were 33 Houses - today there are 130 in 32 States and 92 Foreign Countries.
Just a few doors east of MARYHOUSE:
Is the New York City Headquarters of The Hell's Angels.  The east village is diverse.  One interesting note about this building which the Hell's Angels owns.  The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp, rented an apartment there.  If you don't know who Quentin Crisp is you can rent the movie.  He's worth knowing and the movie, starring John Hurt is terrific.
Crisp said they, The "Angels", were always very nice and gentlemanly toward him.    

Candida, a minister's wife

Saw "A Minister's Wife" at Lincoln Center.  It's a musical adaptation of Shaw's "Candida".  I had seen "Candida" many years ago with Edward Herrmann, Austin Pendelton and Blythe Danner and enjoyed it immensely.  This adaptation did not have the wit and lightness of the production I saw.  So I was not impressed
Tao Te Ching.     
" People are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail."

The New Yorker in "Holy Matrimony" writes about the royal wedding.  Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of the monarchy or aristocrats.  However, many people all around the world will be watching the ceremony this Friday, and they'll dream that they're a part of it all.  The New Yorker mentions that the Queen this past Christmas canceled the staff Christmas party because of "the difficult economic circumstances facing this country".  She is the head of the Church of England but Jesus will have to fore go his birthday party.  Well, actually, just the staff.  According to The New Yorker the royal wedding "will cost British taxpayers an estimated twenty million pounds."  About $30,000,000.  I wonder what that staff Christmas party would have cost.  Oh, oh my back is stiffening.  Tao, Jim, Tao.