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A New York Minute (12)

23 Jan

January 23, 2012

This is your New York Minute. Number 12 in a series, collect them all.

We’re going to continue our river tour of New York City by going up the East River, which separates Manhattan and Brooklyn, and anchor right under the Brooklyn Bridge. Today I’ll give you a few of the lesser known but more interesting facts about what may be America’s most famous bridge.

The opening of the bridge was officiated by not one but two incumbent New York Mayors. Brooklyn was an independent city when the bridge, which was originally called the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, opened in 1883 and wouldn’t consolidate with New York until 1898. The Mayors of both Brooklyn and New York, as well as President Chester A. Arthur, met in the center of the span.

The bridge took 13 years to build but it took only one week to inspire a panic. The bridge was designed with a long pedestrian path above the roadway and one day, as hundreds of people were walking across, a rumor, totally unfounded, spread that the bridge was about to collapse. People panicked, a stampede started, and when all was said and done, at least a dozen people were crushed and killed. Compare that to the great blackout of 2003 and the terror attacks of September 11th 2001. On both occasions, thousands upon thousands of people flooded across the bridge jammed almost shoulder to shoulder. There were no panics and no deaths on the bridge. I was lucky enough to be close to home, but my brother made that journey both times.

But back in 1883 people were afraid to cross the bridge. PT Barnum, showman, circus owner, and utterly shameless self-promoter, paraded 21 of his elephants across the bridge. The bridge was shown to be safe, and Barnum got a ton of free publicity. Leading the parade was Jumbo, and when he died his skeleton went back to New York as property of the American Museum of Natural History. And yes, that elephant’s name, which was a variation of a Swahili word, is where our word jumbo began.

The expression “taking a Brodie,” meaning a suicide jump, began on the Brooklyn Bridge. Steve Brodie, in 1886, may or may not have jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge. He wasn’t trying to kill himself; he just wanted to be famous and bragged about his upcoming jump. He even practiced by jumping from some smaller bridges. It is open to doubt if he ever actually jumped. The New York Times, which covered the event, claimed that he did, but other sources say that, even in 1886, it was a pretty open secret that an accomplice tossed a dummy off the bridge and Brodie simply hopped into the water off a boat so the captain could claim to rescue him. True or not, it didn’t stop him from opening a couple of successful saloons and starting a fairly successful vaudeville and movie career.

Selling the Brooklyn Bridge has also come into popular culture, as in the saying “if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.” In the early part of the 20th Century, George C. Parker did just that. In fact he did it twice a week, every week for years. He’d convince a gullible tourist of the value of controlling the major link between the boroughs and managed to make a nice living. Of course, he didn’t stop at just the bridge. The Statue of Liberty and pretty much every other major landmark was sold at one point or another. He had a large office and impressive looking- but fake- documents and was so successful that from time to time the police had to kick the “new owners” off the bridge and take down the toll booths they had built.

The Brooklyn Bridge undoubtedly still has some secrets left in her. In 2006, city workers discovered a forgotten Cold War era bunker built into the base of one of the Manhattan side supports. It contained supplies to survive a Soviet nuclear attack, including 352,000 cookies still sealed in their original tin cans.


If you want to know more about Steve Brody and his jump, go to one of my favorite, and most reliable sources, Bugs Bunny. Surf over YouTube and search for the 1949 cartoon Bowery Bugs. It’s all about Steve Brody’s jump and the part Bugs Bunny’s played in it. Or just stick around to the end of this post.

Next week we’ll be crossing over the bridge and heading into Manhattan.

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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My Secret Life Upon The Stage

19 Jan

January 19, 2011

Some of you may not have known this. In fact, I’d bet that none of you had an inkling of this. Being the mostly-unknown and lightly-read blogger that I am today was never my career goal. I didn’t set out to turn Mr. Blog’s Tepid Ride into the underwhelming sensation it currently is. No, my secret ambition was to be an actor. Yes, to tread upon the stage.

And some time ago I did just that.

The Time: 1980
The Place: The auditorium of PS 247.
The Production: The Fifth Grade Performance of Peter Pan and Wendy Go Around the World. (One Night Only!)

Yep, I was not even 10 years old when I made my stage debut. Of course, this was not my first job in acting. Two years earlier I had been cast as a jaybird in my third grade play, but that was just staged in the classroom, we didn’t get to stand behind the footlights. It doesn’t really count. Plus some of the other kids teased my by saying “the jaybird is a gaybird” and even though I had no idea what that meant back then, I hated the teasing and told the teacher that I didn’t want to be in the play. Looking back, I may have been the victim of gay bashing. I have a very limited personal experience with homosexuality. I was once hit on by a construction worker when I was 19 but that’s a (true) story for a different time.

Anyway, the fifth grade class of PS 247 was putting on the play Peter Pan and Wendy Go Around the World. It was written by one of the teachers in the school and only much later on did I realize that the title sounds like a 1970’s porno movie.

It was very topical. The premise was that Peter and Wendy went on a tour of the world and saw all the world’s troubles. It was a downer of a play. After flying around the globe and seeing all the wars and poverty and injustice, Peter and Wendy appealed to Tinkerbelle to use her magic to make the world a better place but she turned them down. The end of the play was an appeal to the world, via the audience of around 200 parents, for peace and love and understanding. Turn on the news and see how well that turned out.

This was back during the Carter administration and the Iranian Hostage Crisis. In one scene, Peter and Wendy flew over Iran and dropped in on the American hostages. For whatever reason, not only were Peter and Wendy invisible to the hostages, they were also unable to free them. I am not sure that gaping plot hole was ever explained. Anyway, after the hostages on stage moaned about how awful it was to be held hostage, and Wendy and Peter told the audience how terrible it was to have hostages in the world, it was time for me to hit the stage. My big part, my big line.

I marched on from stage left, strode to center stage, looked out at the audience, and announced “The Ayatollah Khomeini wishes to see the American spies.” Then I marched offstage. Yes, I was an Iranian soldier.

Now today it is cool to embrace the bad guys. Everyone goes to comic cons and dresses up like Darth Vader but at no time were Iranian soldiers ever embraced by society at large. I wasn’t crazy about the part. Plus I only had one stinking line!

But I made the most of it. While I was scripted to say my line and march offstage, I,  like any problem actor, pestered the director, who was my teacher, to make some changes. I argued that being a mean soldier I would never just walk offstage. If the Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to see the hostages I wouldn’t count on the hostages just walking over, I’d march them over at gunpoint. Finally my teacher agreed, or just got tired of me, and that’s how I got to bring my BB rifle and cap pistol to school. (How times have changed.)

We were in charge of making our own costumes. I wore slacks and a blue dress shirt. I took the shoulder braid from my Cub Scout uniform to make it look more military and stuck my silver metal (and very real looking) cap pistol into my belt and slung my (very real) BB rifle across my back. I also wore a blue or black baseball cap.

So I strode onstage, walked to up front and center, paused, looked around to find Mom and Dad, and said my line. I took the rifle off my back and stuck it (hard, I took the role very seriously) into the back of one of the hostages and waved my gun at the other and marched them offstage.

And that was it.

But that wasn’t my last time upon the auditorium stage. I think the acting bug had bitten me. Later, my friend and I tried out for the talent show. We reenacted the Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader battle from The Empire Strikes Back using homemade lightsabers. We took (OK, my Dad took) translucent blue plastic and rolled it into tubes which he then taped atop normal flashlights. In the dark they looked pretty good but the plastic was very chemical-smelling and sniffing it too long made me sick. My friend and I had so much fun fighting with the lightsabers that we never came up with a script. When we auditioned we had the lights lowered and the crowd ohh’d and ahh’d over the cool lightsabers and then laughed as be banged them together while saying, over and over and over, VADER: Luke, I am your father. LUKE: No you’re not! VADER: Yes I am!

We did not make it to the talent show but a few years later my buddy Marc and I proudly joined our junior high school talent show with a production of The Partially Paid For Nightly Network News, which was the two of us sitting behind a desk acting like news anchors and telling bad jokes. We were heckled.

Other acting highlights included the night I got sick and missed my Cub Scout production of an Indian war dance and the time I was at summer camp and I played the father in Bye Bye Birdie. That was my singing debut. (“Kids! I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today!”) Not that I recommend watching it, but if you come across Bye Bye Birdie on cable, I had the Paul Lynde part.

Birdie was played by our 50 year old female director who stepped in at the last moment when the kid playing Birdie threw a tantrum and refused to go on.

Looking back on my acting career, I have no regrets, just a question. Why didn’t those hostages jump off the stage and run out the fire exit when the guard wasn’t around? It was only about 30 feet away.

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