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A New York Minute (7)

19 Dec

December 19, 2011

Welcome to your New York Minute.

While I do ride the subway everyday, I don’t usually take the F train. But on this particular day I was meeting a friend after work and she lives right by the F station so there I was. The F train isn’t one of the cleaner subway rides but is one of the more visible. For much of its run the F line is elevated and it is hard to miss, for reasons I’ll soon explain.

I am willing to bet that most of you know this train line, actually, I bet most of you know one little piece of it as it figures into a scene in one of my favorite movies. No, no Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. My favorite movie is Goodfellas.

Towards the end of the film, mobster Henry Hill was caught by the feds and Jimmy the Gent, played by an amazing Robert DeNiro, was getting ready to whack him. Henry’s wife Karen had gotten a call from Jimmy and went to see him in one of his warehouses. They talked a little and Jimmy offered to give Karen some swag dresses. All she had to do was walk down the block and into a sketchy warehouse. Karen got cold feet, thinking that Jimmy was going to whack her – I love all this mob talk- and jumped in her car and zoomed off. That whole scene was filmed right by the Gowanus canal under the F train. You can’t miss it, the girders and beams of the elevated line frame the whole outdoor part of the scene. In fact, the warehouse is right below the Smith/9th Street station. Since Goodfellas is on the AFI Top 100 list I am willing to bet you’ve seen it.

One interesting note is at that point, if you are riding the train, you are on the highest point of anywhere on the NYC transit system. The Smith/9th Street station rises 87 ½ feet over the city. Opened in 1933, there was actually shipping on the Gowanus canal and the train line had to be that tall to let the ships pass below. If you’ve seen the Gowanus today, the idea of major commerce on that clogged piece of water seems ridiculous, but things have changed quite a bit in the last century.

You can get a really nice view of South Brooklyn and lower Manhattan from this part of the subway (and yes, we still call it the subway even when it is high in the air) but don’t try to visit that station just yet- it is being renovated until 2012, and knowing how NYC operates, probably the year after that.

But if you are interested in getting high- I mean height, hop off the train and go over the historic Greenwood Cemetery, right   near Park Slope. Many notable people are buried there; from Abner Doubleday, the man  who invented baseball, to more Southern Civil War generals than you expect this far north. It is a sprawling place, over 478 acres, and if you want to find the highest point above sea level in Brooklyn, this is it.

Battle Hill is found inside Greenwood Cemeteryand it was the sight of a major battle of the Civil War, part of the Battle of Long Island. You don’t hear much about it outside of history books but this was a big one. To commemorate it, a statue of the goddess Minerva was built there and from that height it has a direct line of sight to the Statue of Liberty, to whom it’s raised hand seems to be waving.

I could go on and on  about Greenwood Cemetery, and with some authority, since I graduated from Greenwood Cemetery.

I’ll pause to let that sink in. I graduated from a cemetery.Greenwoodruns a series of tours and some years back, in one of the hottest summers I can remember, I spent a series of three weekends tramping over the hills taking a guided tour of the place that culminated in a graduation ceremony and yes, I got a certificate at the end. So take your Wharton School of Business MBA and your Harvard diploma, who needs them? I am a proud alumnus of Greenwood Cemetery.

And as a proud alumnus, I have to tell you about the parakeets. Those of you who have never seen them may not believe this given the cold climate, but Brooklyn boasts a thriving population of wild parrots. One major colony nests in the main arches of the cemetery, and another lives at Brooklyn College, from which I also graduated. I think those parakeets are following me. And even though those are their main grounds, the colorful birds can often be seen- and especially heard- in many parts of Brooklyn.

The accepted story is that in the 1960’s, a shipment of the birds escaped from their containers at Idlewild airport and made their way to the cemetery, where their descendants still live today. No one at the time expected them to live through their first New York winter, but we New Yorkers are a hearty breed.

Idlewild is the original name of Kennedy Airport, and if you saw Goodfellas you’d know that, bringing us back full circle.

This has been your New York Minute with a Robert DeNiro cameo.

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

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A New York Legend (6)

12 Dec

December 12, 2011

Hello everyone, time for your New York Minute.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. No matter how good your life is or what state the world is in, it was always better some other time. Believe it or not, some day in the future someone will look back on his life and, with a wistful look in his eyes and the thin line of a tear drying on his check, say that he misses the good old days of 2011 when Occupy Wall Street violently clashed with the police, The Real Housewives were on every channel, and wonder why they don’t have great comedians like Russell Brand anymore. Trust me, wait and see. And yeah, another New York Minute and another shot at Russell Brand. He’s not funny.

A lot of people today are nostalgic for the 1970’s and I’m not sure why. New York was dirty, crime was way up, the subways were covered with graffiti, the city was broke, and every other day one union or another was going on strike. Even the 1970’s didn’t like the 1970’s, it was nostalgic for the 1950’s. Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, American Graffiti, all were set in the 1950’s.

And so was The Lords of Flatbush.

Seriously, was the the worst trailer you have ever seen?

Released in 1974, it was the story of a gang of leather jacketed teenagers from Flatbush, Brooklyn. The teens, played by Perry King, age 26, Sylvester Stallone, age 28, and Henry Winkler, 29 years old, is a coming of age story starring three guys who came of age long ago. They steal cars, shoot pool, hang out, fight, and do all the things you’d expect a Hollywood version of a 1950’s gang to do. It is a good film, and some parts of it were actually shot in Brooklyn. The school scenes were filmed in Lincoln High School in Coney Island. I know that school very well, but that’s a New York Minute for another time.

The only problem with the movie is the totally misleading title. A bunch of greasers from the 50’s? Sorry, no. Ask anyone over a certain age and they’ll tell you that the real Lords of Flatbush were the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers have reached mythic proportions. Anyone who was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the 1950’s is a fan for life, despite the team’s moving to Los Angeles in 1958. Fans were passionate about the players, and even non-baseball fans will recognize some of the names, like Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and Gil Hodges.

My mother and my uncle were Dodger fans growing up, and for some reason my grandfather was a New York Giants fan. It wasn’t like the Mets and Yankees rivalry today, baseball was personal then. The Dodgers were underdogs, they were Brooklyn guys, they were us and we were them. Not me, I wasn’t born yet, but you know what I mean. The Yankees were in the mix too and they had passionate fans but the Dodgers had a blue-collar working stiff image that people responded to. And they were local guys, from Flatbush. So my mom, my uncle, and grandpa were a tight-knit family but sitting around the table talking baseball was a different story. Dodgers fans and Giant fans did not mix. I have no idea how my family survived.

So the baseball debate raged in my family’s first floor apartment on King’s Highway and into the mix a real Brooklyn Dodger was added. Sandy Koufax briefly lived in my family’s building. Yes, my mom knew Sandy Koufax.

165 wins and only 87 losses, an ERA of 2.76, and 2,396 strikeouts. Inducted in 1972, Sandy Koufax is true Baseball Hall of Famer. He threw four no hitters, won three Cy Young awards, and was the league’s MVP in 1963.

Those of you who follow my blog  know that I am a former teacher and I recently finished a nine-week series about my former life. I taught for ten years in a particular school and it happens to be the same school attended by Sandy Koufax when he was a rising high school baseball star. Even decades later it was still a big deal.

So my family has a six-degrees sort of connection to Sandy Koufax and yes he is a legend in the sport, and yes he famously refused to pitch the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on a Jewish holiday, and yes he is revered in baseball circles but again, nostalgia rears its head.

Great athletes do not great people make, and while I am not saying that Sandy Koufax is in any way a bad man, the facts are that when he was young and living in my mother’s apartment building he was, I don’t want to say rude, but he never spoke to any of his neighbors. I don’t mean he turned down autograph requests and refused to give free tickets to the games, I mean he never said hi when you passed him the halls. And decades later, when I sent him a personal appeal on behalf of my high school’s yearbook he never replied. But to be fair, neither did Larry King, who also attended that school.

And while I am name dropping, over the years the school I taught in was also attended by artist Peter Max, Sopranos actor Steven Schirripa, singer Vic Damone, sitcom creator Gary David Goldberg, Paul Sorvino, Rhea Perlman, and my father, among many other famous alumni.

Fred Wilpon, owner of the New York Mets attended that school. Say what you will about him and his team, but when we sent him a letter asking for a donation for the yearbook he actually sent us a donation. Most people never got back to us.

Today the legend of the Brooklyn Dodgers is carried on by the New York Mets. The blue in their uniforms is taken from Dodger blue and their new stadium is a replica of the Dodger’s old stadium, Ebbet’s Field.

Too bad they are such a lousy team. And before you complain, yes, I am a long-suffering Mets fan. And no Mets fan knows nostalgia like we do. Say “1986” to any Mets fan and you’ll get a reaction.

In a few years you may even be nostalgic for this New York Minute.

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