A New York Minute (11)

January 16, 2012

This is your New York Minute.

Last week I told you about Henry Hudson sailing under the site of the Verrazano Bridge. Well, that bridge figures in today’s tale.

The Verrazano Bridge was named after Giovanni da Verrazzano, who was the first known explorer to enter New York Harbor, beating Henry Hudson by about 85 years. It spans The Narrows, a strip of water which connects Upper and Lower Gravesend Bay. It is also the closet point between Brooklyn and Staten Island, which is why the bridge was built there. Although the bridge was built in 1964, The Narrows goes back about 18,000 years to the end of the last ice age. Sorry, I don’t have an exact date for that. Before the Ice Age,Staten Island and Brooklyn were connected, but Staten Island retains a quieter identity of its own.

I could describe the bridge to you but odds are you’ve already seen it in a little movie called Saturday Night Fever. Set and filmed entirely in and around my neighborhood, that’s the film that made John Travolta a star. I stopped holding that against the movie years ago. There are many, many shots of the bridge- it’s a metaphor- and the part where Bobby C falls off the bridge was filmed on the actual roadway.

While I don’t remember much of the filming, I do remember the impact the film’s debut caused in the neighborhood. Everyone saw it, and saw it again, and saw it again. In fact, in the Marlboro Theater, it ran for years. It was constantly running.

You may remember the film’s opening scene. John Travolta is walking- no, strutting down a street, below the train tracks, eating a slice of pizza. That’s 86th Street and it was filmed one short block from my grandmother’s apartment. In fact, those are the same tracks and same streets that you see in the opening of Travolta’s TV show, Welcome Back Kotter and also in the fantastic 1971 Gene Hackman movie, The French Connection. That film has one of the best chase scenes ever filmed, as Popeye Doyle, played by Hackman, races his car through the traffic below to catch up to the speeding train on the tracks above.

But back to Saturday Night Fever. It is amazing the movie ever got made. I don’t mean because the studio had no faith in it, and that’s true, but what I’m talking about is the constant harassment by the people of Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge.

Men in the neighborhood hated John Travolta. Why? Because the women loved him. Every girl and young woman in this part of Brooklyn flocked to see him. The entire cast was mobbed wherever they went. The guys took their frustrations out on the cast and crew, especially Travolta, who had to endure threats and obscenities from the mostly rowdy teens.

If the harassment stopped there it would have been bad enough, but Bensonhurst in the 1970’s was, let’s say, a bit connected. Remember I said they were “mobbed” wherever they went? If you know the book or movie Donnie Brasco, those are the guys. No matter where they tried to film, the producers had to pay off about a dozen local hoods for the privilege of filming.

Even worse than the harassment and shakedowns was the bomb threat to the disco, where the company ended up paying a lot of protection money. 

The film was finished and the rest is movie and soundtrack history. Most of the places where they filmed are long gone- the paint store, the dance studio, the disco, even the theater I saw it in are just memories.

Of course the Verrazano Bridge is still there. And I am sure the arsenal of 1,500 rounds of ammunition discovered buried near the base of the bridge just a couple of years ago was only a coincidence.

This has been your New York Minute.

An audio version of this legend recently appeared in the amazing FlashPulp website. Check them out for awesomeness and goodies!

Tags: Bensonhurst, bmj2k, Brooklyn, John Travolta, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. BTR, New York, New York Minute, Saturday Night Fever, Verrazano Bridge