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A New York Minute (11)

16 Jan

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!

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A New York Minute (9)

2 Jan

January 2, 2011

Welcome to your New York Minute.

They say that you can find anyone anywhere at anytime in New York. And that may be true, because this week I’m broadcasting from the intersection of Rex Harrison and Allen Ginsburg. Well, so to speak.

Rex Harrison may be best known as Doctor Doolittle in the 1967 film- you guessed it- Doctor Doolittle.

Can we get a little Rex Harrison? That’s the stuff.

He was a wonderful actor. Noel Coward said he was “the best light comedy actor in the world—except for me.” Um, Noel Coward was talking about himself, not yours truly.

Rex Harrison died in 1986, leaving behind six wives (five of them exes, of course) two sons, and three step-sons. One of his sons, born to actress Lilli Palmer, was a bright lad named Carey.

Carey Harrison is the celebrated author of 35 stage plays and 16 novels. He has written for radio and television. Masterpiece Theater has dedicated 17 hours to his work. Among many other things, he is a book reviewer and a columnist. He has won numerous awards and is currently writing an opera.

And he was my English professor in Brooklyn College.

Now I have to be honest. When I was his student I knew nothing about any of that. I knew his father was a famous actor but that was as far as it went. Professor Harrison was, and presumably still is, a very nice man and a scholarly gentleman. I enjoyed his class, which was planned around the novel The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. I recall coming up with an insight about some of the minor character’s names, which I realized were the names of lesser Knights of the Round Table. Despite probably having heard the same insight hundreds of times from hundreds of students, he made me feel as though I had really accomplished something, which I much later in my own career realized was a hallmark of a good teacher.

The class was small, about a dozen of us gathered around a large conference table in his office, which he used instead of a classroom. It was intimate. One thing I admired about him was his passion not for writing, but for curiosity. At one point in the novel a character drinks, I believe, a sloe gin fizz, though it might have been a mint julep. Any of you Ford Madox Ford nuts in the audience, write in and tell me which it was. Professor Harrison stopped us to ask us about the drink. None of us had ever had one. We knew it was an alcoholic beverage, and some of us knew what was in it, but that wasn’t good enough for him. He chastised us- in a kind way- for not knowing more. What did it taste like? How was it made? I suspect it was that level of passion and attention to detail that makes him such a successful man.

I took the class in the winter and he invited all of us to a holiday party at his home and one of my regrets is that I didn’t go. I was never much of a joiner, especially then, and the prospect of spending the night in the company of what were virtually strangers and my English teacher did not seem very inviting. But as I said, I had no idea who my professor was. Looking back, all the questions I could have asked, all the stories I could have heard, the potential valuable professional contact- Professor Harrison, if you listen to Flash Cast, and I’m sure you do, please, invite me back! And if any of his current students are listening, yo, hook me up, dudes!

But I did say I was broadcasting from the intersection of Harrison and Ginsburg.

Allen Ginsburg, as I hope most of you know, was one of the leading Beat Poets of the 1950’s. If you know nothing else of him, get out of the house and look up his poem “Howl.”

He was a poet, a hippie, and a postmodernist. He was a Buddhist, a protestor, and a professor. Yes, he too taught English at Brooklyn College.

I did not get to meet Professor Ginsburg, though I understand no one called him Professor. I took Professor Harrison’s class not long after Allen Ginsburg died. Professor Harrison brought us into the small and dingy English Department office they shared. It was nothing special. It was functional, painted with neutral, faded grey paint and stocked with slightly beat up and worn furniture like you’d find in a cheap walk-in clinic. From the surroundings you’d never guess two such distinguished men worked there, yet they did. Professor Harrison reverently pointed to Allen Ginsburg’s chair, which he never allowed anyone to sit in, and showed us Ginsburg’s plants, which Professor Harrison continued to water. And if you Ginsburg fans are wondering, the plants were ordinary ferns, not marijuana.

I can’t say that I appreciated any of that tale at the time, but now several years later and reading it back as I write, that’s a pretty good story. And where else could it happen but Brooklyn New York?

 

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

 

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