A Helluva Town, Part 2

[Here’s the second part of my coverage of oddities, curiosities, and idiosyncrasies in the town so nice they named it twice. In this section, you’ll find some New York City sights you can actually go see, some small and endearing, others large and majestic. I start again, though, with another factoid about the city, one about which I imagine some readers may have wondered.]

Let’s get to one of the most curious facts about The City. (If you live here or anywhere nearby, New York is just “The City.” To many, that means specifically Manhattan, and some New Yorkers from the other four boroughs speak of going “to the city” when they mean Manhattan.) I’m thinking of the city’s world-renowned nickname, The Big Apple. 

People worldwide recognize the name, but there are lots of stories about where the moniker comes from. Many are apocryphal, and even the fact that the origin’s unknown or uncertain is no longer true. (One false account that was popularly circulated had it that the name referred to an early-19th-century New York City brothel whose madam was named Eve. The girls were “Eve’s Apples.”) 

There are many interesting details about the nickname, but the basic story is fairly simple. It started to show up in a column by John J. FitzGerald (1872-1952) in the New York Morning Telegraph in the 1920s; his use spread the name around the country. 

It was at first a term used in horseracing circles—New York was a big racing town in the early and mid-20th century, as Damon Runyon (1880-1946) would affirm (consider “Fugue for Tinhorns” from Guys and Dolls (1950): “I got the horse right here”)—particularly among the African-American stable hands. 

The moniker meant that New York was the center of the racing business, where the crowds were large and knowledgeable and the bettors well-healed and avid. Running in the Big Apple was the horseracing equivalent of playing the Palace!

By the ’30s, the name had been appropriated by the jazz world, who had the same relationship with New York City as the horseracing world did—it was the best place to have a gig. Heading for the Big Apple was climbing to the top of the jazz pyramid. (In 1937, a song called “The Big Apple,” recorded by Tommy Dorsey (1905-56) among others, became a hit.) 

From that usage, continuing into the ’40s and ’50s, the nickname spread and became permanent. In the 1970s, New York City’s official tourist and marketing bureau began promoting the city as “the Big Apple,” marking it as the semi-official name for the city, and in 1997, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (b. 1944; Mayor of New York City: 1994-2001) approved the designation of the southwest corner of 54th Street and Broadway, near where FitzGerald lived his last years, as “Big Apple Corner.” 

So, the Big Apple we are, and the Big Apple we shall ever be! Now, go buy a T-shirt.

(By the way, the town of Manhattan, Kansas, population 52,000, likes to call itself “The Little Apple.” Minneapolis, Minnesota, has apparently taken to calling itself “The Mini-Apple.” A coupla fellow-travelers, if ya ask me!)

If nothing else, the Big Apple is a city of tall buildings. To be sure, there are some small structures—the Village is still a low-rise neighborhood—and some of them have histories or other noteworthy aspects, but New York City is famous for its skyscrapers. 

From the Woolworth Building (opened 1913; 57 stories at 792 feet) to the Chrysler (1930; 77 stories at 925 feet) and the Empire State Building (1931; 102 stories at 1,250 feet) to the ill-fated World Trade Center towers (1973; 110 stories at 1,368/1,362 feet), there are many world-renowned high-rises in the city. 

One of the city’s most beloved buildings, however, isn’t even considered especially tall by today’s standards. Across from the south end of Madison Square, on a triangle of land formed by the intersection of Broadway, 5th Avenue, and East 23rd Street, with East 22nd Street forming the southern, flat end, stands the Flatiron Building, for a few years one of the tallest buildings in the city. 

It was one of the first skyscrapers and the first in New York City north of 14th Street. Completed in 1902, the beaux-arts Flatiron stands only 22 stories and 285 feet tall. (The top floor, built as artists’ studios, was added after the building was completed.) 

Originally named the Fuller Building after its builder, George A. Fuller (“the father of the skyscraper,” 1851-1900), the nickname “Flatiron” stuck because of the unique shape: it comes to a 25-degree point at the northern end (because Broadway crosses 5th Avenue at 23rd Street at a diagonal as it runs from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side) and unquestionably resembles the household appliance for which it was nicknamed: a flatiron. 

The location of the building was a particularly windy spot, in part because of the building itself, blowing women's long skirts enough to show a little ankle occasionally. Girl-watchers gathered to catch a glimpse and were often shooed away by the traffic cops in the intersection, hence, supposedly, the origin of the phrase, "23 skidoo!"—the phrase the cops would shout to warn away the gawkers. True or not, it's an amusing anecdote.

The building became a New York City Landmark in 1966 and a National Historic Landmark in 1989. The area from 23rd Street south, bordered by Chelsea on the west, Greenwich Village on the south and west and the East Village and Gramercy Park on the east—a region that includes my apartment building—has now become known as the Flatiron District after about 1985 when the district shifted from mostly commercial to heavily residential. 

The neighborhood includes Union Square which, contrary to some popular theories, wasn’t named for the labor unions that used to surround it—the last Tammany Hall is on Union Square East and 17th Street—nor the Federal Union, despite the presence of an equestrian statue of George Washington (1732-99; First President of the United States: 1789-97) at the south end of the park and a standing statue of Abraham Lincoln (1809-65; 16th President of the United States: 1861-65) near the north end, but the “union” of Broadway and Bowery Road (now 4th Avenue/Park Avenue South), two important city thoroughfares. 

(Union Square today, the site of occasional concerts and many political rallies for various causes, is the location four days a week of the city’s largest and most popular Greenmarket farmers’ market where I can get farm-fresh produce and other seasonal, locally grown products in the country’s biggest city more easily than I could when I lived in small-town Oneonta in the upstate dairy-farm region. Just about now, I’ll be getting the best corn, peaches, and Jersey beefsteak tomatoes anyone can find anywhere! Eat your hearts out, people!)

The intersection of Broadway/Union Square West and East 14th Street, at the southwest corner of the square, used to be known as “Dead Man’s Curve” at the turn of the 19th Century—not because of accidents between motor vehicles or between cars and people, or even horses and people, but because of frequent fatal encounters between pedestrians and the cable cars plying along Broadway as they swerved around the corner of the square. The spot today is its own little park—a large garden really—with a small statue of Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas K. Gandhi; 1869-1948) installed there in 1986.

While other famous buildings have distinctive silhouettes when seen from a distance, the Flatiron is immediately recognizable at ground level. It has become one of the most iconic sights in New York City and appears in films and on TV as a frequent symbol of the city. 

The building appears, for instance, in the opening montage of city images for The Late Show With David Letterman. Today the Flatiron houses offices of several publishing firms, but in 2009, an Italian real estate company bought the building and plans to convert it into a luxury hotel when all the current leases expire—no earlier than 2019.

There are many objects that have become visual symbols of New York City over the years, like some of the buildings I named above, or Times Square, the Guggenheim Museum, the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center, Washington Square Arch, the Statue of Liberty, or the Brooklyn Bridge—some more familiar to New Yorkers and others to out-of-towners. 

One that may be more-often recognized by those who live here was originally a symbol of an international exhibition, the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The Unisphere, located in what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, the site of both the ’39 and the ’64 World’s Fairs, is a 12-story-high, stainless steel representation of the Earth intended to commemorate the beginning of the age of space exploration. 

The theme of the fair was “Peace Through Understanding” and the Unisphere was dedicated to "Man's Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe." Three stainless steel rings circle the Unisphere, commonly believed to represent the orbits of Yuri Gagarin (1934-68), the first man in space (1961); John Glenn (1921-2016), the first American to orbit the Earth (1962); and Telstar, the first active communications satellite (active: 1962-63; still in orbit). 

In truth, the original design included rings for all the satellites in orbit at the time of the fair but that wasn’t practical so the symbolic number of three was chosen for aesthetic reasons.

Designed by landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke (1892-1982), the Unisphere was donated by the U. S. Steel Corporation. The world's largest globe, with a diameter of 120 feet, it stands 140 feet tall and weighs 350 tons; its base, an upside-down tripod, adds another 100 tons. 

The Unisphere’s built on the foundation of the Perisphere, half of the Trylon and Perisphere, the iconic symbol of the ’39 World’s Fair, which the Unisphere replaced. The Unisphere, like the Flatiron Building, has become so recognizable as a New York landmark that it figures in many films, TV shows, and videos. It is especially dramatic when floodlit at night. 

The ledge surrounding the Unisphere is a popular spot for skateboarders. It was officially landmarked in 1995.

One of New York City’s least-well-known holdings is probably one of the world’s most famous bears. I’m not talking about Smokey or Yogi, but Winnie-the-Pooh, the leader of A. A. Milne’s (1882-1956) little band of animal characters, beloved of children (and not a few adults) everywhere. 

Few people know that the original toys, including Winnie, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger, all reside at the Children’s Center in the New York Public Library’s main building at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. 

(Roo, the baby kangaroo, was lost in an English apple orchard during the 1930s, long before the toys found a home at NYPL, and never recovered.  The original toys used to live at the Donnell Library on East 53rd Street, which housed the largest NYPL children’s collection, but that building was demolished in 2011, so the dolls moved in 2008.  

(To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh, Queen Camilla commissioned a custom replica.  The new Roo was formally delivered by the Queen on 29 April 2026, during a royal visit to the United States.)

You can buy replicas of Pooh, but the ones in the glass case are Christopher Robin Milne’s (1920-96) actual childhood playthings, starting when his father bought the bear for his first birthday in 1921. (The stuffed bear’s original name was Edward Bear; Christopher changed it to Winnie-the-Pooh later.) 

The rest of the stuffed animals came later during the ’20s. (The first Pooh book was published in 1926.) In 1956, the year A. A. Milne (b. 1882) died, the original toys were put on display at E. P. Dutton, Milne’s U.S. publishers, and though they made several visits back to England for promotional events over the years, they remained at the publishers until they were donated to NYPL in 1987. 

They’re a little ragged now, obviously well-loved and much-handled—the family dog was apparently also drawn to the dolls—but thousands of children visit them weekly in the library, which is open to all during its regular operating hours.

The library itself is a wonder, of course, with the famous lions, Patience and Fortitude, guarding the expansive, block-long front entrance plaza. It is the largest research library in the world that is open to the public without special arrangements or restrictions. 

In fact, the entire New York Public Library system, which covers Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx (Queens and Brooklyn each have their own library systems), is terrific, despite draw-downs due to budget cuts over recent years. 

My own branch, the Jefferson Market Library at 10th Street and 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village, is one of my favorite buildings. (I think it’s one of Woody Allen’s favorites, too. He featured it in Hanna and Her Sisters.) 

Originally a courthouse erected (with an adjacent prison which now is the site of the library's garden) during the years 1875-1877, the building was converted into the Jefferson Market Library in the early 1960s and opened for use in 1967. 

The red-brick building, designated a New York City landmark in 1969 and a New York State Landmark in 1980, has a wonderful clock tower that’s visible (and audible) all over the Village and lower Chelsea and houses the New York Collection of old and interesting books on the history of New York City. 

(Jefferson Market Courthouse was the site in 1906 of Harry K. Thaw’s [1871-1947] trial for the murder of architect Stanford White [1853-1906], known as the Girl in the Red Velvet Swing case because the motive had been White’s affair with Thaw’s wife, the actress Evelyn Nesbit [1884-1967].  

(The late Ellen Stewart [1919-2011], founder of La MaMa E.T.C. [1961] in the East Village, was incarcerated in the women's jail early in her New York days, and it is the setting for scenes in Melvin Van Peebles's [1932-2021] 1971 musical play, Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death.)

There are wonderful library facilities, both for their architecture and for their holdings, all over the city, but one particularly curious branch is the Terence Cardinal Cooke-Cathedral Library, located down a flight of stairs, just outside the turnstile entrance to the No. 6 IRT train on the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 50th Street, halfway down the entrance steps. 

There is no street-level sign announcing its existence and the NYPL webpage for the branch just states that it’s on “the lower level.” The NYPL website describes the library as “one of the more compact branches” in the system, though at 2,100 square feet, the Cooke library is only the second-smallest in the NYPL system--the 700-square-foot Macombs Bridge Library in Harlem is the smallest of all 90 branches. 

Closed on Saturdays and Sundays, the Cooke branch is a full-service library, however, substituting laptop computers for desktops because of space but offering all the services of larger branches to both local residents and regular subway commuters (plus a little traveler and tourist assistance to confused drop-ins).

Perhaps a more well-known sight in Manhattan stands outside the front entrance to the Port Authority Bus Terminal (42nd Street and 8th Avenue). An eight-foot bronze statue of Jackie Gleason (1916-87) in his Honeymooner's bus driver's uniform, his lunchbox in his hand, looks out over the passers-by. Commissioned by the cable network TV Land, the Raph Kramden statue is only one of three public statues I can think of that depict actors in roles they made world-famous like that. 

The others are the statue of Sylvester Stallone (b. 1946) as Rocky Balboa in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and one of Mary Tyler Moore (1936-2017) as Mary Richards throwing her beret in the air in downtown Minneapolis. 

(There’s a famous statue of 19th-century actor Edwin Booth (1833-93), elder brother of John Wilkes (1838-65), as Hamlet in Gramercy Park—but Booth hardly made that role famous; rather, his portrayal of the Prince of Denmark made Booth famous. He was the first American-born actor to achieve an international reputation—and he essentially invented the character of Hamlet the way we think of him today: the melancholy, morose, black-clad brooder.)

You may not consider statues of Gleason or Booth as art, but they are part of the public-art landscape of New York City, arguably one of the most diverse and extensive in the country if not the world. Even New York’s subway system, the largest in the world and the only one to operate 24/7 for 365 days a year, has art. 

Along with the musical performers, there are works of visual art in the stations as well. There are small, almost inconspicuous pieces by nearly anonymous artists around the system, and some large pieces by significant American artists, too. 

There are mosaics on the walls of many recently renovated stations like the performing arts images at Lincoln Center on the 7th Avenue IRT (Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers by Nancy Spero [1926-2009], 2004) and the Alice in Wonderland figures at 50th Street on the same route (Alice: The Way Out by Liliana Porter [b. 1941], 1994). 

Then there’s the Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) glass mosaic (New York in Transit, 2001), his last commission before his death, and the Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97) panels (Times Square Mural, 1994) in the Times Square station at 7th Avenue and 42nd Street; the Maya Lin (b. 1959) clock sculpture (Eclipsed Time, 1994) on the ceiling of Penn Station; the Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) sculpture (Jamaica Center Station Riders, Blue, 1991) at Jamaica Center/Parsons-Archer in Queens; and the Romare Bearden (1911-88) stained-glass triptych (City of Light, 1993) at Westchester Square/East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx.  

I’ve already written an article for ROT (27 April 2011) on the imaginative bronze sculpture installation by Tom Otterness (b. 1952), Life Underground (2000), all over the 8th Avenue/14th Street station, and across town on the L line at Union Square/14th Street, artist Mary Miss (b. 1944) created Framing Union Square (1998), stand-alone panels made out of the original architectural elements, including six "14" eagles, that had been elements of the 1904 station, salvaged from the renovation of the station complex, one of the largest and once the most confusing in the system. 

Additionally, there are red frames in the station walls at 115 locations highlighting a fragment of the station's initial construction such as old mosaics, rivets, steelwork, and wiring. 

At the Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue station on the BMT line in Brooklyn, famed theater director Robert Wilson (1941-2025), also a sculptor, has My Coney Island Baby (2004), a glass-brick wall featuring silk-screened images of the characters and entertainments of the historic Coney Island amusement parks. 

At Herald Square, located along the platforms of the BMT Broadway line at the 34th Street station on the BMT and IND lines, is REACH New York, An Urban Musical Instrument (1996) by Christopher Janney (b. 1950). This piece consists of a rack of sensors hanging along the length of each platform. Waving your hand in front of a sensor creates a corresponding sound from the rack—on the opposite platforms where passengers can respond by using the instrument. 

In addition to these and other visual art works are some occasional examples of different kinds of art—if you look out for them—like the Burma Shave-like poem, Commuter's Lament, or A Close Shave (1991) by Norman B. Colp (1944-2007), mounted on the ceiling of the corridor that connects the 7th Avenue subway station at Times Square with the 8th Avenue station and the P. A. Bus Terminal. The verse—"Overslept / So tired / If late / Get fired. / Why bother? / Why the pain? / Just go home / Do it again"—is partly hidden among the ceiling beams until you actually come upon each line (and you’re looking up).

Not all the art in subway stations is sanctioned. Keith Haring (1958-90) became famous as a graffiti artist by chalking his dancing stick figures on the black panels of unused advertising spaces in stations all over Manhattan. Occasionally, the guerrilla art in the subways is more complex and difficult than that. 

In the fall of 2010, for instance, a group of 103 international street artists, many of them well-known in the world of street art, created or installed works in an abandoned subway tunnel, the exact location of which was kept closely guarded (because what they were doing was illegal). 

Almost no one aside from the artists saw the installation, known as the Underbelly Project, and it closed the night it opened. One New York Times reporter was invited, on the condition that he not reveal any details that would locate the exhibit, to tour the improvised underground gallery. (A London Sunday Times Magazine writer was also invited.) The artists were identified only by their street-art monikers. 

Two artists, known only as Workhouse and PAC, organized the show after Workhouse had been shown the space by an urban spelunker. Because the only way to enter the unfinished station was to jump off the platform of a functioning one and run along the tracks, the artists had to be careful about how often and when they accessed the space, so they restricted contributors to only one four-hour visit and they had to bring all the necessary materials with them—there would be no running out for resupply: if an artist ran out, improvisation was the only remedy. Lighting was provided by battery-powered camp lanterns, which had to be dowsed if MTA workers were detected on nearby tracks. 

In November 2010, police arrested 20 people for trying to get into the guerrilla gallery after its existence had been revealed. While neither the originators of the exhibit nor the police specified the location of the clandestine art site, accounts pointed to an abandoned 1930s station built above the Broadway IND stop on the G line, near South 4th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 

Though the exhibit has been abandoned by the artists, New York Transit officials said they had no plans to dismantle it (principally for budget reasons, I gather), but vandals and souvenir-seekers had begun to take away or destroy the art, not to mention the dampness and other environmental forces below ground.

Another asset of the MTA in New York City is the New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn. Like the subway itself, the museum is underground! 

Located in a historic 1936 IND subway station in Brooklyn Heights, it features 19 restored subway cars and other exhibits. (The Transit Museum also operates an annex in Grand Central Terminal.) 

But that’s just one of the unusual museums in the city.  Along with our many world-class art collections, New York City has several . . . shall we say “idiosyncratic” museums.  In that last category is the National Museum of Mathematics (the subject of a ROT post on 31 July 2011); known as MoMath, its address is 635 Sixth Avenue (in the Flatiron District along the former Ladies’ Mile), where it moved in February 2026, after opening in 2012.  

Near Madison Square is the Museum of Sex—which, while it’s just what you think, is a serious, not to say scholarly, endeavor.  (Not for the kids, however, unless you’re especially progressive in your child-rearing.  Visitors must be at least 18 years old.)  Located at 233 Fifth Avenue, near 27th Street, MoSex is the brainchild of NYC businessman Daniel Gluck (b. 1968) and self-styled artist Alison Maddex (b. mid-to-late 1960s).  Described as "a sacred place to study" by Maddex and as "high brow" by Gluck, the museum opened in 2002

At another museum, the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (where the Unisphere is), is one of the neatest sights in New York City: the Panorama of the City of New York. (QMA occupies the former New York City Pavilion of both the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs.) 

Billed as the world's largest scale model, the Panorama covers 9,335 square feet and recreates in miniature 895,000 New York City buildings—every building constructed in all five boroughs before 1992, built to a scale of one inch to 100 feet. Updated in 2005, it took 100 craftsmen more than three years to construct, timing the completion for the opening of the 1964 fair. (Originally, visitors viewed the Panorama from small cars running on tracks above the model, simulating a helicopter tour.) 

The model, conceived by New York City master builder Robert Moses (1888-1981), is filled with little details, like the miniature Roosevelt Island tram going across the East River just north of the Queensboro Bridge (recently renamed in honor of former mayor Ed Koch). There are also tiny airplanes at LaGuardia Airport that take off and land on wires!

Returning to the subject of sex—well, sort of—how many cities can boast a famous Naked Cowboy? I’m tempted to say, ‘Only in New York.’ Robert John Burck (b. 1970), aka: The Naked Cowboy, is actually from Cincinnati and first started his busking routine in Venice Beach, California, in 1997, but he’s a New Yorker now! 

He came here in 1999 and started hanging out in Times Square, all year ‘round in snow and rain and bright sunshine, dressed only in a white cowboy hat, white cowboy boots, and tighty-whitey briefs—with a guitar slung strategically in front to cover not his near-nakedness, but to perpetuate the illusion of nudity. (Okay, so he’s not actually naked. You gonna sue?) 

Burck’s trademarked his “stage” name—he’s sued over infringements of his trademark—which he has inscribed on his briefs across his glutes. He’s even franchised his gig—for $5,000 a year! (You can buy Naked Cowboy merch on his website.) 

Burck’s principal occupation is pursuing world-wide fame, toward which end he will appear at weddings—as of 2008, he can even perform your marriage in New York State—and has made appearances in commercials; in music videos; in Austin, Nashville, in his hometown of Cincy, and at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. He’s such a fixture that tour-bus guides point him out and he claims to make as much as $1,000 in tips a day. 

Burck’s recorded country albums (including an X-rated one) and, just to mix things up, ran for mayor of New York City in 2009 (that’s the race when Bloomberg won his third term), announcing in July 2009: "No one knows how to do more with less than yours truly.” He withdrew in September, but in October 2010, he announced his 2012 candidacy for President of the United States as a Tea Partier. 

For his presidential declaration, Burck cut his shoulder-length dark blond hair and wore a suit for the press conference. According to his own bio, the New York State tourist bureau had declared him "more recognizable than The Statue of Liberty" and he had by 2007 “officially became the most photographed person in the world.” Who knows? Could be true.

Since ROT is supposed to be a theater blog, I’ll end with a little theater fact. 

New York City, of course, is the theater capital of the United States and, arguably, the world. (Almost every actor and company wants to play here; nearly every playwright wants the cachet of having his work produced here. Further, we see more of the world’s great theater, from London to Johannesburg to Tokyo, than any other single city I can think of.) 

Many of New York’s theaters and performance spaces have gained international renown and have colorful histories that are fun to learn. I want to consider one historic theater that’s more out of the way than most you might think of: the BAM Harvey. 

Located on Fulton Street in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, near its now-parent institution, the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Lafayette Street, the Harvey is the last of Brooklyn’s legit playhouses. 

BAM, as it’s universally known, began in 1861, the oldest performing arts center in the U.S., and opened in its current location, in a huge beaux-arts building, now called the Peter Jay Sharp Building, that houses the Howard Gilman Opera House and other BAM facilities, in 1908. 

The impresario Harvey Lichtenstein (whose brother was the artist Roy Lichtenstein, 1923-97) was named president of the organization in 1967 and remained until 1999. During Lichtenstein’s tenure, BAM became the site of many international performances by the famous and the not-so-famous from around the world, including Ingmar Bergman’s Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, Philip Glass, and the Moscow Art Theater, as well as companies from around the U.S. and North America. 

The stunning Next Wave Festival, which presents two seasons a year of music, dance, opera, and theater from all over the globe, began in 1983 (two years after being introduced as a series).

The Harvey, renamed for Lichtenstein (1929-2017) in 1999, was opened as the Majestic Theatre in 1904 (with a staging of The Wizard of Oz), one of the many legit theaters outside Manhattan—Brooklyn had quite a number then—where shows played before moving to Broadway, after playing there, or were revived in star-led productions. 

Along with its classics, musicals, and contemporary plays, the Majestic soon began presenting vaudeville revues to which was eventually added the novelty of the age, moving pictures. In the 1930s, the WPA theater program presented many productions there. In 1942, the Majestic was converted into a movie theater until it was closed in 1968 and essentially abandoned to deteriorate. 

In 1987, BAM purchased the 874-seat Majestic as the venue for Peter Brook’s 9-hour adaptation of the Indian epic The Mahabharata. According to Brook’s wishes, the theater was renovated and cleaned up, but left intentionally distressed, a “modern ruin,” in reflection of the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the home theater of the Centre International de Créations Théâtrales, Brook’s Paris-based company. 

After The Mahabharata played there during the 1987 Next Wave Festival, the theater remained in its deliberately ruined state, winning the Architectural Theater Award in 1988. With its crumbling columns and water-stained ceilings, the distressed interior of the Harvey, as it’s now known, lends a unique element to every performance on its circular stage, resembling an old Greco-Roman amphitheater as reconceived during the Renaissance and then left to go to seed.

[When I’ve been working outside New York City, I often get the same question from colleagues, students, and parents: Isn’t New York a dangerous place to live. (This was especially common in the bad ol’ ’70s.) 

[Of course, there’s crime in New York City, but I’ve always maintained that its reputation as a hazardous place is unearned; the impression outsiders get is probably because of the spotlight that’s always on New York and the fact that as the country’s largest metropolis, there’s more of pretty much everything here than anywhere else. 

[There aren’t actually more crimes committed in New York City per capita than in, say, San Francisco, or even Springfield, Illinois—but because there are dozens of times more people here than there, it seems as if you’re more likely to be a victim here. 

[In fact, FBI statistic show that the Big Apple is the safest big city in the U.S. by a large margin. I’ve lived in New York for over 35 years and I’ve been out and about at all hours of the day and night, in all parts of the city, on foot and on the subway—and I’ve not only never been the victim of a crime, I’ve never even witnessed one. Bad ol’ New York is a myth.

[The other common question I get when I’m away from home is whether I miss New York. Of course, I do, and I always explain that I mostly miss my own surroundings, like my apartment and my kitchen—just like anyone else away from home. 

[But I also explain that when I’m in another town for any time, I do miss some specific New York amenities: I miss the great selection of theater fare and restaurants, of course, and the museums and I miss the special resources I rely on like the New York Public Library, especially the Library for the Performing Arts. 

[Most of all, I think, I miss the neighborhood restaurants of nearly every kind of cuisine that are all in walking distance and which almost all deliver or do carry-out when I don’t feel like cooking for myself. No other city I’ve ever visited offers that convenience and I sometimes wonder how I’d ever live without it!

[New York City’s unquestionably a curious place. It’s part of the imaginary landscape of many people who don’t live here and perhaps haven’t even ever visited. It’s the setting of countless TV shows and movies and not a few plays—and has been for decades, even centuries now. 

[Vilified by some and beloved by others, New York City has a symbolic existence quite outside the quotidian life of its eight million residents and two million daily visitors. 

[One statistic I’ve never been able to verify is whether, as I believe, there have been more songs written about New York (not even counting “The Big Apple”) than about any other city in the world. I wonder if anybody knows?]

A Helluva Town, Part 1

[Years ago, when I was expecting a friend from Virginia to stay in my Manhattan apartment while I was away, I started to compile a little instruction booklet for her to use to find her way around, first, the apartment and my building, then the local neighborhoods. 

[I expanded “Rick’s Guide to New York City” little by little to include bits of info about the city beyond my cruising range, and part of what I included was a sort of list of oddities and unexpected factoids about New York City, concentrating on Manhattan. 

[New York, as I’m sure most people know, is immense, with 8 million inhabitants (“There are eight million stories in the Naked City”) over 305 square miles. (There are as many as 10 million people in the city at any given time. Los Angeles, by contrast, has under 4 million inhabitants in 468 square miles.) 

[The NYPD, the largest police force in the United States, consists of 35,000 officers (not counting auxiliary officers and School Safety Agents), the equivalent to as many as 3½ army divisions. The New York City school system, also the largest in the country, educates (no cracks!) 1.1 million students, the population of Dallas.

[New York’s also fairly old for a U.S. city, 387 years, so it has peculiarities and characteristics that many who don’t live here, and even many who do, don’t know about. Since I know that there are readers of ROT who aren’t New Yorkers and who haven’t spent time here, I thought it’d be fun to publish part of my personal little “Guide to New York City” for those who’re curious about the Big Apple.]

"The Bronx is up and the Battery's down." That's true, but Brooklyn is also "down" and Queens is sort of “up” (it’s really “over”). New York City really doesn't exist. The five boroughs are actually quite separate, both physically and emotionally. 

Everyone knows that Manhattan is an island, for instance, and some people even know that Staten Island is part of New York City (although it's nearer New Jersey and even voted to secede in 1993). 

But New York City is actually three main islands (and many smaller ones such as Roosevelt, City, and Governor's). Beside Manhattan and Staten Islands, Brooklyn and Queens are actually on Long Island. Only the Bronx is on the mainland.

There are about 30 additional islands that are part of the City of New York, though not all of them are inhabited or even accessible. Some form separate communities with their own characters, like City Island off the Bronx, and others are city neighborhoods, like Roosevelt Island (formerly Blackwell’s Island and then Welfare Island), accessible by the Roosevelt Island Tramway, a cable car over the East River. 

(The tram opened in 1976 and was the only commuter tramway in North America until 1984. A ride across to Roosevelt Island costs the same as a subway or bus ride, currently $3.00, and the fare is paid with the MTA’s electronic OMNY system. The famous Staten Island Ferry, by the way, has been free since 1997.) 

Other well-known islands are tourist sites, like Ellis Island and Liberty Island (home of the Statue of Liberty, of course), or parkland, like Governor’s Island, formerly a military installation that’s become open to the public since 2003. The famous Coney Island, with its beach, boardwalk, and amusement park, is no longer an actual island as it was connected to Brooklyn by landfill in the 1930s.

(Rikers Island, a name probably recognized nationwide--and possibly beyond--is famously, or infamously, the site of a city jail complex in the East River.  Opened in 1932, it's part of the Bronx (but has a Queens zip code) and at 413 acres, accommodates 10 jails and a daily average of 10,000 prisoners, making it one of the world's largest correctional institutions.)

The five boroughs of New York City are also counties: New York (Manhattan), Bronx, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), and Richmond (Staten Island); it’s the only U.S. city so (dis)organized, I believe. Brooklyn was a separate city (and still claims to be the fourth largest city in the U.S.) until the 1890s, after the Brooklyn Bridge was built (1883) to connect it to Manhattan. (Many Brooklynites are still miffed about this betrayal.) Greater New York, comprising the annexed Richmond, Kings, Queens, and Bronx Counties, wasn’t formed until 1898.

Note that the storied Dodgers of baseball were never the "New York Dodgers" but always the Brooklyn Dodgers (until Walter O’Malley moved them to L.A. after the last game at Ebbets Field in 1957). The Yankees, you'll notice, are never called the "Bronx Yankees"—though they are known as the Bronx Bombers occasionally. The Dodgers, of course, were just "The Bums"—or "Dem Bums" if you spoke the local dialect. (The hapless Mets, just to complete the trilogy, play in Queens, formerly at Shea Stadium and, since 2009, at Citi Field.) 

The New York Giants and the New York Jets football teams both play in New Jersey. In retaliation, the former New Jersey Nets basketball team, which played in New York until 1976, relocated to Brooklyn once a new stadium was completed there in 2012. (Ironically, the site of the new stadium, the Barclay Center, is near the site where Walter O’Malley had wanted to build a new Dodgers stadium, the rejection of which led to the move to L.A.) 

That means that there’s a major league sports team in four of the five boroughs, with the basketball Knicks and the hockey Rangers both playing at Madison Square Garden (which, for the uninitiated, isn’t in or even near Madison Square) in Manhattan. (There’s a minor league baseball team on Staten Island, the Staten Island Yankees. The Mets-affiliated Brooklyn Cyclones, another Class A baseball team, play on Coney Island.)

The city’s odd political divisions make things even more peculiar. There are three different levels of political activity in New York City, aside from the federal and state politics that are part of the city’s life. 

First, obviously, are the city-wide politics. The city as a political entity elects the mayor, the city’s executive, and each city council district elects a councilperson to represent it in the city legislature. We also elect a Public Advocate, a sort of balance to the mayor, as well as a City Comptroller, our treasurer. 

The Public Advocate is a kind of ombudsman though the office has little actual executive authority. The Public Advocate is first in line of succession to the mayor’s office if something should happen to the incumbent.

The next layer is the boroughs, and this is where things start to get complicated in comparison to other cities. The boroughs used to have much more power because the borough presidents (known as the BP, or sometimes the Beep) appointed members to several powerful boards, but the city government was reorganized by court order in 1990 and the borough presidents were relegated to little more than figureheads whose main jobs are boosting their boroughs for tourism, investment, and development. Many borough presidents have run for mayor and several have been elected.

Finally, since each borough is also a county, there are county politics. While the mayor, comptroller, public advocate, city council members, and borough presidents are all city positions, subject to city regulations and laws such as term limits, county posts are under state jurisdiction and are not subject to the same rules. 

The five district attorneys, for instance, are county positions. That’s why the long-serving Robert Morgenthau (1919-2019) could be DA of New York County—he was often called the Manhattan DA, but that’s just common usage and actually incorrect—from 1975 to 2010, even though all other New York City officials were subject to a two-term limit after 1993. 

(Mayor Bloomberg forced a one-time extension of the limit before the last election in 2009 so he could run for a third term, which he did and won.) 

After Morgenthau retired, the two longest-serving New York City DA’s have been Charles Hynes (1935-2019) of Kings County (Brooklyn) and Robert Johnson (b. 1948) of Bronx County, from 1990 to 2013 and 1989 to 2015, respectively. 

(There was a really old Law & Order episode [“The Serpent's Tooth”; season 1, episode 19; first aired 19 March 1991] that used this little-known fact as a plot twist.  The Executive ADA promised a suspect/witness that he wouldn't be prosecuted in New York County if he testified. 

(His lawyer, not a native New Yorker, signed off on the deal, obviously figuring that New York County was the whole city—the way Los Angeles County includes both the City of L.A. and some of its suburbs—but after the court session, the witness was arrested.  

(When the lawyer protested, the ADA pointed out that the deal was for “New York County—that’s Manhattan.  I never gave your client immunity in Brooklyn; that’s Kings County. . . .  Next time, sir, get a better lawyer.”)  

Each county also has its own branch of the New York Supreme Court (the trial court in New York State) and New York State trial judges are elected (to 14-year terms), but the DA’s are the only elective county offices of any stature as there are no executive or legislative positions in the five New York City counties.

Some of the borough names have curious origins. 

Many New Yorkers know the lame joke about the visitor who asks, “What’s a Bronk,” for instance. The Bronx, which isn’t plural despite its sound, got its name from a Swedish settler in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, Jonas Bronck (1600-43), whose land was along the river that came to be known as Bronck’s River. 

The name Brooklyn is of Dutch origin, derived from the Dutch town of Breuckelen in the province of Utrecht. Staten Island, directly from the archaic Dutch name Staaten Eylandt, means State Island, named in honor of the Dutch parliament, the Staten-Generaal. 

Manhattan is probably the simplest (aside from Queens, of course) because its name comes from the transcription by one of Henry Hudson’s officers of the name he heard the native Indians, the Lenape, use: Manna-hata. It’s supposed to mean “island of many hills.”

There are also several rivers, aside from the famous Hudson to the west, separating Manhattan from New Jersey. There are the Bronx River and the Harlem River, both in the north. (The Bronx River, the one named for the Swedish settler, is the only one that’s entirely fresh water.) 

The East River, in reality, isn't a river at all. It's actually an arm of the ocean, is salt water, and has tides like the harbor. Because it's narrowed by Manhattan Island on the west and Long Island on the east, connecting New York Bay with the Long Island Sound, it looks like a river.

When New York City was consolidated in 1898, it obviously incorporated towns and villages that had been separate communities in the counties of Bronx, Queens, and Richmond. (By the time of the consolidation, Kings County was pretty much coterminous with the city of Brooklyn, but in the 17th century, Breuckelen was just one of six Dutch towns at the western tip of Long Island.) 

Many of those villages are still more like suburban towns than city neighborhoods, though others have been absorbed into the metropolis. In Manhattan, however, there are two neighborhoods that used to be separate villages—centuries ago, to be sure—and though the city around them has grown right up to their former borders and pulled them into the big city, they still retain much of the flavor and character of the villages they used to be before New York City became a megalopolis.

The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem, annexed to New York City in 1873, began as a Dutch village named for the town of Haarlem in the province of North Holland. New Haarlem, as it was originally called, was founded in 1658. (Jonas Bronck, who gave his name to the river, county, and then borough now known as the Bronx, was one of the original settlers in 1639.) 

When the British conquered the colony of New Amsterdam in 1664, anglicizing the Dutch names in use in the former New Netherland, the village at the northern tip of the island became Harlem. The site of a Revolutionary War clash (the Battle of Harlem Heights, 6 September 1776), Harlem was mostly farmland until the mid-19th century; for most of that century, Harlem was known as the site of elegant living. Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, had an estate in Harlem. 

The rest of New York City still concentrated at the southern end of the island, terminating at about what is now Washington Square, the territory between the city and Harlem was either wilderness or outlying farms until quite late in the city’s history. 

Travel between the two ends of Manhattan was effected by boat up the Hudson, an hour-and-a-half trip in the days of steam. When the river was iced over in winter, the stage coach served as an alternative. 

The New York and Harlem Railroad, which became Metro North, was inaugurated in 1831. In the middle of the 19th century, when the land became over-farmed, the area became blighted and property values dropped as residents abandoned Harlem. When the elevated rail line was introduced in 1880, Harlem’s fortunes picked up again, however. 

Over-construction and a delay in extending the subway service to Harlem reversed the trend to elegance, wealth, and culture in Harlem by the end of the century and low real estate prices attracted new immigrants, mostly East Europeans. 

Harlem was becoming a center of African-American life and culture as the black population grew starting in the 1880s, increasing to a flood in 1904 because of another drop in property prices and rising racial exclusion in the rest of the city. 

By the 1920s, fueled in large part by the Great Migration from the Jim Crow South and the search by northern industries for factory workers as the World War I draft took so many of the traditional laborers, working-class whites, into the military, the percentage of Harlem‘s black population increased rapidly, giving rise ultimately to the Harlem Renaissance in art, music, and literature. 

Since then, the neighborhood’s fortunes have risen and fallen with the cultural trends that effected America’s black population and the economy in general.

The other separate town that became absorbed into New York City is still known as a village—in fact, “The Village.” That’s Greenwich Village, of course, which in the 16th century was an Indian tobacco field along the Hudson in lower Manhattan a few miles above the original New Amsterdam colony. 

In the 1630s, the Dutch turned it into a pasture which they named Noortwyck, largely used again to cultivate tobacco. After the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664, the British formed a separate settlement from the main colony to the south and renamed it Greenwich Village, which was first established as a village in 1712. 

Breakouts of yellow fever in the city in the 1820s and smallpox in the 1830s forced many to flee to the fresher air of Greenwich Village and there was a housing boom in the hamlet in the 1830s. The elegant homes around Washington Square, which had been a potter’s field in the 18th century, were built around 1832 and established the Village as a center of fashion and gentility (as celebrated in Henry James’s 1880 novel Washington Square and the 1947 stage adaptation, The Heiress by Ruth and Augustus Goetz). 

In the early 20th century, the Village became the New York center of progressivism, the avant garde, bohemianism, and even radicalism in politics and the arts. The little theater movement, which grew into the regional theater movement across the country and the Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway movements in New York City, was initiated with the births of the Provincetown Players (1915 on Cape Cod; 1916 in New York) and the Washington Square Players (1916). 

By the 1950s, Greenwich Village was the New York seat of the Beat Generation and a decade later the base of New York’s hippies. Jazz clubs, coffeehouses, rock clubs, and other venues sprang up all over Greenwich Village and its offspring, the East Village, all through the second half of the 20th century. Artists and writers flocked to the neighborhood until the real estate costs grew too high for them to afford, and there was always a veneer of upper-class bohemianism in the Village. 

It became the center of New York City’s gay community in the ‘60s—the famous Christopher Street is one of the Village’s main commercial thoroughfares; the site of the Stonewall Riot which launched the gay rights movement in 1969, the Stonewall Inn, is in Greenwich Village. Today, the gay community has moved uptown to Chelsea for the most part and the artists’ studios and galleries moved first downtown to SoHo and, when that got too expensive, to Chelsea also. 

The Village is still a center of theaters, restaurants, and boutiques, and it’s always a pleasant, interesting, and fun place just to amble, with many small residential streets that even now feel much like the small hamlet Greenwich Village once was, with old brownstones and trees lining the narrow, picturesque lanes.

Have you ever heard of Señor Wences Way? Would you know where Minnelli Way (as in Liza with a Z) is? If you mailed a letter to Leonard Bernstein Place or Joe DiMaggio Highway, would the post office deliver it? 

If you never heard of any of these New York streets, don’t feel embarrassed—most New Yorkers wouldn’t be familiar with them, either. They’re honorary names for parts of regular streets in the city, often temporary but sometimes permanent—though always only symbolic, so the USPS (the folks who deliver snail mail) doesn’t recognize them and taxi drivers can’t find them on any map. 

I think there are some other cities that do honorary street renaming, Chicago for instance, and they probably all do it similarly to New York City, but I’d guess we have more of them, for more people, organizations, and events than any other town in the U.S. Some commemorate people who truly deserve to be honored for their accomplishments, some are obviously politically motivated, and some are just plain silly (or, perhaps worse, commercial). 

The City Council approves honorary names, but it’s pretty much pro forma after the local Community Board recommends them; some CB’s are easy on approvals, others don’t seem to like the idea at all. 

(The widow of Jerry Orbach, the actor beloved as NYPD detective Lenny Briscoe on Law & Order but who had a long career on the stage, including four Tony noms, before that gig, wanted to get the corner of 53rd and 8th Avenue, near where they lived for a quarter of a century, renamed in the actor’s honor. The local CB, however, routinely rejects all such requests and played true to form this time, too. So Elaine Orbach went to the neighboring CB, which oversees the opposite corner of the same intersection, and she succeeded in getting Jerry Orbach Way approved. Location, location, location!)

All these honorary street names have two street signs, one with the regular, permanent name (for example, 7th Avenue) and one for the honorary name (some of which are also permanent, but still not official as far as the post office is concerned, like Fashion Avenue, as 7th Avenue is designated between 34th and 39th Streets in Manhattan because that’s the main drag of the Fashion District, the center of the women’s clothing industry here). 

Permanent honorary street names have green signs just like the regular signage; temporary signs are blue and remain for several weeks or several months; brown signs mark a historic name, often an old one from when New York City was still forming. 

A few double names are both accepted and recognized by the post office and city maps and so on, such as 6th Avenue/Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan or Lenox Avenue/Malcolm X Boulevard above 110th Street in Harlem. 

Other official second names are not accepted by USPS but are nevertheless recognized by everyone who lives in or knows the city, such as the blocks in Midtown Manhattan between 9th and 10th Avenues on 42nd Street and 8th and 9th Avenues on 46th Street which are universally known (and signed) as Theatre Row and Restaurant Row respectively.

Some honorary street renamings have been for commemorative purposes such as the scores of honorary signs that went up all over the five boroughs to acknowledge the police officers and firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11. Others remember historical figures, such as Harriet Ross Tubman Avenue in Brooklyn or Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Corner in Manhattan. 

There are even honorary names that commemorate events, sometimes for political reasons, such as the renaming of the intersection of 12th Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan as Tiananmen Square Corner in remembrance of those who died there in 1989. 

Even organizations can get a street name: The Order of the Sons of Italy Way in Manhattan and Sisters of St. Joseph Boulevard in Brooklyn. This doesn’t preclude the use of the renaming process for commercial or promotional purposes: Hammacher Schlemmer Way, MTV Music Awards Street, Bike to Work Week Boulevard, and the intersection of Beauty Way and Beast Avenue, usually known as 47th Street and Seventh Avenue (right near the Palace Theatre, where Disney’s Beauty and the Beast opened).

Some more oddities of New York’s grid:

• 3rd Avenue, below Astor Place, is the Bowery (from the old Dutch word for ‘farm’), famous for bums and derelicts.
• Lexington Avenue starts at 21st Street (Gramercy Park) and continues north. Between 14th Street and 20th Street there’s a charming little street called Irving Place (named after Washington Irving in 1833) where Lex should be. (In Herb Gardner's play A Thousand Clowns, he mentions "14th and Lex," an intersection that doesn't actually exist.) Irving is said to have actually lived on Irving Place for a while (probably before it was named for him), at 122 E. 17th Street, also known as 49 Irving Place, on the southwest corner of 17th and Irving.
• 4th Avenue exists only from 14th Street south to Astor Place (ca. 8th Street). Below Astor Place it's Lafayette Street (location of the famous Joseph Papp Public Theater). Along the Square, it's Union Square East, but between 17th and 34th Streets, it’s Park Avenue South. It used to be 4th Avenue, and the house numbers still act as if it were. Above 34th Street, it’s Park Avenue, with a new numbering system starting at 34th Street (1 Park Avenue).
• Everybody in New York City talks about 6th Avenue, except the post office and the street signs. They persist in calling it "Avenue of the Americas" (to which the street’s name was changed in 1947). No one uses that, not even the subways and busses—but you'd better know it, or you'll get lost. Ed Koch, when he was mayor, wisely had the street marked with both names. Below Canal Street, 6th Avenue merges with and becomes Church Street.
• 7th Avenue below 14th Street is 7th Avenue South. Below W. Houston Street, it becomes Varick Street.
• At Abingdon Square in the West Village, 8th Avenue merges with Hudson Street.

On the Upper West Side, at 59th Street, several changes take place:

• 59th Street itself is called Central Park South (CPS) between 5th Avenue and Central Park West as it runs along the southern border of Central Park.
• 8th Avenue becomes Central Park West (CPW); above 110th Street (also known as Cathedral Parkway), it becomes 8th Avenue again or Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
• 9th Avenue becomes Columbus Avenue; above 110th Street, it becomes Morningside Drive.
• 10th Avenue becomes Amsterdam Avenue.
• 11th Avenue becomes West End Avenue (WEA).

110th Street is called Central Park North (CPN) as it runs along the northern border of Central Park; it’s also called Cathedral Parkway elsewhere because the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, is located along it. 

6th Avenue ends at CPS, of course. When it starts up again above Central Park at 110th Street/Cathedral Parkway, it’s renamed Malcolm X Boulevard. It’s also known as Lenox Avenue and bears signs for both names. 

7th Avenue behaves much the same way, continuing above 110th Street as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

Travelers have to be careful, especially in the Village: there are both a Washington Place (southern edge of Washington Square) and a Washington Street (far west in the Village, parallel to the Hudson), not to mention Washington Mews (a private street north of Washington Square, property of NYU). 

There’s also a Greenwich Street (one block east of Washington Street) and a Greenwich Avenue (running from 9th Street and 6th Ave. to 14th Street and 8th Ave.). There is Broadway and also West Broadway (running from Canal Street to Washington Square; its last block, near NYU, is called LaGuardia Place) and East Broadway (on the Lower East Side). 

There’s MacDougal Street and MacDougal Alley (both near Washington Square), Minetta Street and Minetta Lane (both near 6th Avenue south of Washington Square) and Jones Street (West Village) and Great Jones Street (East Village). 

Along with Park Avenue, there's also Park Row (near City Hall), Park Place, and Park Street (near Ground Zero, the former WTC site); there are also both a Madison Avenue and a Madison Street (Lower East Side). There’s also both W. 12th Street and Little W. 12th Street (in the West Village meat-packing district). 

This isn’t even counting the name duplications between one borough and another, such as 5th Avenues in both Manhattan and Brooklyn. Fulton Street in Manhattan is downtown near City Hall, but Fulton Street in Brooklyn, which is mostly a pedestrian shopping mall now, is in Fort Greene, not far from the Brooklyn Academy of Music; there are subway stops (on different lines) in both areas with identical names.

• Broadway cuts across Manhattan on a diagonal, starting in the Financial District, running up the Lower East Side, crossing 14th Street at 4th/Park Avenue creating Union Square. At 23rd Street, it crosses 5th Avenue and makes Madison Square. At 6th Avenue and 34th Street, the intersection of Broadway creates Herald Square. When it meets 7th Avenue at 42nd Street, Times Square is formed. (Father Duffy Square—recently dubbed "Actors' Square"—with the statue of George M. Cohan and the TDF TKTS booth, is the north end of Times Square.) At 59th Street and 8th Avenue/CPW, Columbus Circle is formed (the only traffic circle in Manhattan).
• On the Upper East Side, at 53rd Street, east of 1st Avenue, Sutton Place replaces Avenue A. This is not a name-change, since the three lettered avenues end at 14th Street because the East River cuts into the land. At 60th Street, Sutton Place (New York's highest rent street) becomes York Avenue.
• Madison Avenue starts at 26th Street (Madison Square, where Madison Square Garden was first built; it has moved twice to get to its current site).
• Riverside Drive (RSD – lovely old mansions and once-elegant apartment houses overlooking the Hudson River) starts at W. 72nd Street and meanders along the river (and Riverside Park) on the far West Side.
• South of 8th Street (Greenwich Village, SoHo) and north of 110th Street (Harlem, Ft. Washington, Morningside Heights), things get very screwed up. You need a map or a native guide!
• W. 4th Street is a weird little street. Though numbered like the others, it is not straight and actually intersects with 10th through 13th Streets in the West Village. It is still called West 4th Street as far east as Broadway in the East Village, when it finally straightens out and becomes E. 4th Street, and fits neatly between E. 3rd and E. 5th Streets. It also becomes Washington Place when it forms the southern boundary of Washington Square Park. You go figure it out. W. 3rd Street is very similar to W. 4th. In both cases, the house numbers are as unruly as the street itself. Be careful looking for addresses on these two Village streets. Or the streets themselves, for that matter.
• There are no numbered streets below 8th Street on the West Side (except the above-mentioned W. 3rd and W. 4th Streets): 1st through 7th Streets only exist east of the Bowery in the East Village.
• 8th Street between 3rd Avenue and Avenue A is known as St. Mark’s Place (in honor of nearby St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, where Peter Stuyvesant is buried).
• The intersection of, say, W. 4th Street and W. 10th Street is a peculiarity of the Village. But more peculiar even than that is the intersection of Waverly Place and Waverly Place. It happens at the Northern Dispensary near Sheridan Square, and—I would venture to say—nowhere else in the world. Now that's Greenwich Village!
• In Harlem, there are intersections of 125th Street with 130th, 126th, and 127th Streets.

With all those streets, it’s no wonder that New York is a city of parades. I suspect New York City has more parades than anywhere else in the world; I can’t prove it, and maybe Moscow in the days of the Soviet Union, where they loved a military display, could beat us, but I doubt that—and even if they could, those days are gone. 

Most parades in New York are in Manhattan, but not all. And most parades in Manhattan go down 5th Avenue—but not all. (The famous tickertape parades for designated heroes, either actual, like returning troops or astronauts, or sports champions, like the Yankees when they win a pennant or the Knicks when the nab the NBA crown, go up lower Broadway in the Financial District while spectators throw paper waste down on them from the tops of skyscrapers.) 

New York City has three general kinds of parades, starting with the many organized processions, like the Thanksgiving Day Parade and St. Patrick’s Day Parade (the oldest parade in the U.S., and the oldest St. Patty’s parade in the world). These are organized by some group or other formal entity (like Macy’s, who does the Thanksgiving parade) and they determine who marches and what the rules will be. 

These are, of course, formal parades, with police security lining the route and traffic halted along the parade streets and many officials turning out to walk along and be seen. Then there are the semi-organized parades, like the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. I think that’s the only one of its kind in New York (though the Coney Island Mermaid Parade may have similarities), and anyone who shows up can march and no one plans the costumes or the order of march. The route’s determined and there are police barricades along the sidewalks and other official trappings, but the rest of the procedure’s pretty much ad hoc. 

Finally, there’s the world-famous Easter Parade, popularized by the Judy Garland song (which wasn’t originally about New York City, but who’s gonna complain?). This is a completely ad hoc promenade: there’s no organization, no monitoring, no official anything. You just show up and walk—preferably wearing an elaborate hat, often homemade and silly. In any case, New York loves its parades. We better: we pay millions for the cleanup afterwards!

NEW YORK SURVIVAL TIPS

[The following comment by Andrew H. Malcolm was published in the New York Times on 19 April 1991; it's rather appropriate. ~Rick]

One striking thing about New York City is its residents' willingness to tell visitors where to go, whether recommending a good restaurant or responding to comments on their civility.

But here is a non-New Yorker's advice for visitors who don't know what questions to ask:

New Yorkers don't actually think they are more important than anyone else. They know it. What else could explain why they came here? And look at the geography: New Yorkers live where the Passaic River and the Gawanus Canal merge to form the Atlantic Ocean. Enough about import.

New Yorkers are not happily ignorant about the rest of the country. They recognize there are 50 other states. They know the H in Ohio is silent so it comes out Iowa.

Next, something about city geography. New York City is Manhattan, period. The other three boroughs—Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx—were allowed in because the subways had to end somewhere. Staten Island, which is trying to get out, was needed to keep New Jersey at bay and to support the wrong end of a bridge named for the explorer Verrazano, who left too.

Now about crime. Some people think that a city where 5.5 people are killed on the average day should be called Detroit. This is ridiculous. New York is a fine name. New York remains one of the region's safest island cities. And the New York Police Department, with the uniformed personnel equivalent to two full Army divisions, is determined to keep the city as safe as it already is.

Some fashion tips: wear running shoes everywhere, as New Yorkers do; yes, it looks funny, but so do life jackets. Wear all luggage like bandoliers. Do not take photographs; that's what those nifty Big Apple postcards are for. Wear jewelry only indoors. For streetwear, don a Walkman; in groups, everybody don a Walkman. If you run low on incense, go to Times Sq. Do not say hello to people, even if you know them; it's too Des Moines. And places like Idaho don't even have subway cars to deface. If someone says hello to you, use those shoes; he's not from Des Moines.

Also, do not admit to possessing a driver's license; it hurts the environment and New Yorkers oppose pollution unless it's in the Hudson River. Do not expect New York bus drivers to accept United States currency. Walking in groups of 500 or more for safety requires a parade permit, which explains Fifth Avenue's closure every 15 minutes.

Above all, do not try to trick these big-city people about the pigeons. New Yorkers know they're just grown-up sparrows.

[Andrew Malcolm captured an attitude that many see here in the Big Apple. I hope you all take it in the humor it’s meant and have had as much fun contemplating how strange this huge town can be. But my list of New York City oddities has grown too long (and won’t ever include all the peculiarities of this great city). So I’m going to break here and pick up again in a few days. If this coverage of my town’s curiosities and idiosyncrasies amused you, come back to ROT and see what else I’ve dug up.]

Inuksuit

In 2000, I took a Christmastime trip to Quebec City with my mother and a group organized by my undergrad alma mater. (Washington and Lee University has a marvelous travel program, though the trips aren’t inexpensive because they stay and eat at the better places and take along a faculty member or someone else knowledgeable about the destination as a kind of “intellectual sherpa,” along with whatever tourist escort may also travel with us.  I reported on another trip with W&L, to Istanbul, on ROT on 24 June 2010.)  

Quebec at Christmas is like a Currier and Ives winter scene and it was a wonderful trip, not least because I got to speak French again after many years of disuse.  (I’m proud to say that a lot of it came back pretty quickly.  It was fun to do that again.) 

Anyway, it’s become my practice to bring back as a souvenir from my travels nowadays a piece of local art or craftwork if I can find something appropriate that I like, and my selection from this vacation was a piece of Inuit sculpture.  I ended up with a small piece called Inukshuk by Davidee Qimirpiq [Qimirpik; b. 1985], a Canadian Inuit artist from Cape Dorset (Kinngait), Baffin Island, in the Territory of Nunavut. 

The figure was a common subject among Inuit artists when I was in Quebec, and the carved green soapstone stands about eight inches tall and vaguely resembles the silhouette of a man assembled from large stones with two legs, a torso with a head, and two arms stretched out to the sides parallel to the ground.

The Inuit, still called Eskimos in the U.S., especially in Alaska, were nomadic hunter-gatherers well into modern times.  Traveling constantly across land and water, the Inuit couldn’t really carry much that wasn’t of immediate practical use, so artwork, aside from a little carved ivory or bone, was uncommon. 

In about 1945, however, the Canadian government encouraged the Inuit to settle in towns, learn cultivation, and give up the nomadic way of life.  The world around the Inuit had changed and their subsistence existence was becoming untenable, but the sociological effect was nevertheless profound. 

The government saw that the move to permanent habitation left many Inuit without traditional occupations.  Looking around for something with which to replace the lost income and work, the government lit on art and established training programs and outlets for the Inuit output.  The plan succeeded: the Inuit had a latent talent for art of all kinds, and they started a co-op to market and pricetheir work. 

Inuit art took off in popularity and desirability in the south and several artists became renowned.  (I published a profile of Inuit painter and printmaker Pudlo Pudlat on ROT on 28 September 2009.)  Art museums organized exhibitions of Inuit works and collectors began buying the art.  Whole villages thrived on the art turned out in their community studios. 

The themes and subjects of the art expanded from a focus on traditional culture to embrace the modern universe around them.  The media used by Inuit artists has expanded as well, from simple carvings to sophisticated sculpture, painting, drawing, lithography, and all the forms commonly used by Western artists.

Among the most popular subjects when I was in Quebec and later in Vancouver at the other end of the country were native animals, Inuit figures, and the mysterious and majestic inuksuit, a form nearly ubiquitous in the galleries and shops all over both cities.

The title of my sculpture, Inukshut, is actually a misnomer.  According to Norman Hallendy’s Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2000), an inuksuk (“acting in the capacity of a human”; pl. inuksuit) is a symbolic structure that conveys a message.  Actual inuksuit aren’t anthropomorphic and may, in fact, be composed of a single large rock standing on end. 

[Norman E. Hallendy (Canadian; 1932-2023) was an Arctic researcher, writer, and photographer.  He was a graduate of the Ontario College of Art in the field of Industrial Design.  Over 40 years, Hallendy had a continuous relationship with the Inuit of Southwest Baffin Island.  During this time, he has acquired an extensive body of traditional knowledge.  He’d been an invited lecturer at numerous Canadian, American, and British universities and he was an associate of the World Archaeological Society and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.  He was a Research Fellow of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec (now the Canadian Museum of History) and a Research Associate with the Nunavut Research Institute in Iqaluit, and Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution.  His field of expertise was Arctic ethnogeography.]

The structure depicted in my sculpture, often called an inuksuk, is actually an innunguaq (“in the likeness of a human”; pl. innunguait).  Innunguait aren’t really a category of inuksuit according to Hallendy, though other sources seem to consider them one.

I suppose that the artists (or gallery owners) misnamed the artworks because, first, inuksuk is a little easier for us Southerners—to Nunavummiut (people from Nunavut), even Quebeckers are Southerners!—to say (it’s pronounced ih-NOOK-shook) and, second, most art patrons, unless they’re steeped in Nunavut sociology and anthropology as well as aesthetics, don’t make the distinction.

Whatever the reason, the facts about inuksuit and innunguait are fascinating.  When I got home with my sculpture, I did a little reading on the topic; I’d heard a little about them while I was in Quebec and there were books around on them, but I didn’t have the leisure to get into the subject until I got back. 

(The English spellings of Inuktitut words vary from source to source, and apparently the preferred forms in Nunavut and Canada are inuksuk, inunnguaq, and inunnguat.  I’m going to stick with the way Hallendy spells the words because he was my first source.  I’ll let the Canadian government and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada come after me if they want.)

The name inuksuk is based on the Inuktitut word inuk, which means, simply, ‘person.’  (It’s also the singular of Inuit, which consequently means ‘The People.’  This is analogous to several American Indian tribes, such as the Navajo, whose name for themselves is Diné, which also means ‘The People.’)

Innunguaq, despite its different appearance, is derived from the same word.  Innunguait are probably more recognizable to non-Inuit, though they aren’t the most common form of stone structure, because of the striking shape and the dramatic sight they provide when seen looming upon a hill or rising up on the horizon, like a giant guardian standing watch over his land. 

Inuksuit are of uncertain age; though, since they’re practical objects, they’re constantly being built and rebuilt or allowed to fall into neglect and deterioration when they’re no longer useful.  (Inuksuit may decay naturally—polar bears have been knownto knock them over—but it’s considered sacrilegious to destroy one or remove its stones.  Bad luck will plague anyone who does.) 

Some of the most ancient, turned “black, dark green or blazing orange” with lichen or white with “the signatures of countless birds,” have been dated back to the Tuniit (or Tunniit) people, known in the West as the Dorset Culture but whom the Inuit call their ancestors.  The Tuniit, a tall and strong people, migrated to Greenland from Alaska between 500 B.C.E. and 1000 C.E. 

(The appearance of innunguait, the cruciform stone constructions that resemble humans, may only date from the arrival of Christian missionaries in Arctic Canada, but that conclusion’s debatable.  After contact with the Vikings around 1000 C.E., the first Europeans to interact with the Inuit and other inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic were an English explorer in the late 16th century and then North American colonials in the 17th century.) 

Many of the ancient inuksuit are venerated regardless of their usefulness today because of their age and because they were built by the ancestors of the Inuit.  Whenever they began to appear, inuksuit could be monumental stone constructions built and used by Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, and Yupik peoples, and other inhabitants of the North American Arctic. 

In a region where the flat tundra presents few natural landmarks—the terrain’s either featureless or the snows and ice shift constantly, obliterating any recognizable topography—the man-made cairns served as navigational signals and markers to later travelers in a land where the natives were nomads who followed the scarce game as well as the open water ahead of each year’s freeze. 

In addition to the trackless terrain, there were no trees on which to carve signs or symbols, so those who passed through first left piles of stones that loomed up on the horizon as the next travelers arrived.  An inuksuk might point the way to a plentiful fishing or hunting ground, warn about danger, blaze a safe trail, or mark a good camping site or cache of food.  They could also convey more complex messages that only the knowledgeable and astute hunter could read.

According to Hallendy, some inuksuit, like the ones intended as navigational aids, were made to be visible from far away, while others, such as those that designate a cache of food, might be hidden so that only the intended traveler could see them.  Some inuksuit were built so they stood out against snow; others so they could be seen on the shore from sea. 

In some cases, a series of inuksuit were sited so that they could lead travelers over a great distance along a difficult route; in other instances, the cairns have been arranged in a circle, marking a site of power or reverence, like a kind of Inuit Stonehenge. 

Some inuksuit are large enough and so fortuitously situated and constructed, says Hallendy, that they can create their own “microclimate” with their “own temperature, wind conditions and humidity within a one-metre (three-foot) circle.” 

Some inuksuit are as simple as a single stone, as I said, and some are constructed from three or four large, flat stones fashioned into a kind of doorway or some abstract shape, but many are immense stacks of large rocks, standing many feet tall and sometimes covering several feet of ground as well.  (My little sculpture is a single piece of soapstone carved to look like assembled rocks.  It is, of course, Qimirpiq’s representation of an inuksuk, not a miniature replica.) 

Clearly it took many hands to construct these, though Inuit nomads traveled in small bands, usually a single family, and often the father would travel ahead to hunt or scout the route to the next fishing or hunting ground.  Yet somehow the huge cairns were built to send messages to those following behind.  Hallendy describes how one Inuit created an inuksuk as he observed:

Because of the importance placed on inuksuit, their construction was rarely taken lightly.  I often watched an elder studying a jumble of broken rock, without so much as touching a single stone, visualizing how one piece could fit with another.  Only when the picture was complete in his head would a helper bring the selected stones to where the inuksuk was to be built.  The figure that emerged was determined as much by the shape of the stones selected as by their arrangement.  Since it was essential to shim and balance the rocks as they were put in place, often a wonderful construction came into being as the builder cautiously sought the centre of gravity to give his inuksuk a long life.  Like a three-dimensional puzzle, the pieces fit together with such precision so as to be held in place by the force of gravity.  Though they may be of varying sizes and shapes and perform a variety of functions, inuksuit are not only a pleasure to behold but are so well balanced and constructed that they can withstand the ravages of time and countless storms.  “Nakalanagu!” its creator may exhort: May you stand forever!

It’s not clear how a subsequent trekker could interpret the earlier travelers’ messages, but somehow the inuksuit communicated not only from one nomadic band to the next, but across the years.  (Inuktitut, the Inuit language, had no written form until one was invented by Europeans in the 18th century, so there was no way of leaving notes or inscribed messages to explain what the inuksuk meant.) 

There’s nothing overtly recognizable in the shape of the cairn that would suggest a meaning, and no two inuksuk obviously resemble one another so that some kind of traditional iconography might seem to have been established.  Hunting partners might devise common signs and signals, but it’s just a wonderful mystery—and it must have worked or the Arctic people wouldn’t have kept using inuksuit for so many centuries.  For existing inuksuit along a familiar route, someone who knew the path might explain the cairns newer hunters will encounter, often in the form of a song.

There are many stories about what inuksuit and innunguait have been used for, including forms of defense against Indians, who were threats to the Inuit in past centuries. 

(The ancient enmity between Indians and the Inuit is, in fact, part of the reason the name Eskimo isn’t used in Canada.  It’s a “foreign” word: the derivation is arguable, but in any case it’s believed to be from one Indian language or another and is considered derogatory.) 

Hallendy figures from the stories he heard that the inuksuit were built to look at a distance like crouching Inuit to scare away the invading enemy.  Whatever their purpose, the giant innunguait do look like sentinels standing watch, though how effective that’d be as a deterrent is certainly questionable. 

Some of the stories say that the innunguait were armed with spears and draped with skins to fool the Indians who, the tales insist, were effectively frightened away.  Hallendy reports that Inuit friends have told him that some inuksuit can make whistling or moaning sounds, perhaps from the wind blowing through the stones, creating an eerie effect.  (There are inuksuit that are made with a kind of Aeolian harp installed so that the wind would cause them to clang and clatter across the soundless Arctic terrain.) 

Well, that’s the story, anyway.  It makes great folklore. 

Inuksuit are among the oldest and most significant man-made objects on the vast Arctic landscape and for the Inuit, inuksuit possess spiritual meaning as well. 

The inuksuk has become a part of Inuit folklore and a symbol of Inuit history. The Inuit people celebrate the inuksuk through the handcrafted carvings, like the Qimirpiq I own, that sell in galleries all over the world. 

Today many Inuit display the inuksuk to show pride in their native culture. This may explain why the flag of Nunavut, established in 1999 as an Inuit homeland (the name means ‘our land’ in Inuktitut), bears a bright red innunguaq imposed on the half-yellow, half-white banner. 

The inuksuk has become not only a symbol of Inuit culture but is increasingly serving as a Canadian national symbol.  The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, for instance, adopted the innunguaq as an official symbol, and the lobby of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., boasts a large innunguaq-like sculpture by Inuit artist David Ruben Piqtoukun (1950-2026).

Because for centuries they’ve guided hunters to safe passages across the measureless Arctic tundra, the inuksuit remind the Inuit of their dependence on one another and the value of strong community. 

Because they’re ancient, they connect the people to their past and inspire awe.  Because not even the Arctic winds and snows can knock them down, they represent endurance.  Because they are constructed only of stones found on the spot, they demonstrate resourcefulness.  Because there’s no mortar or cement, they exemplify ingenuity.  Because they serve practical functions, they have significance. 

Though each stone of an inuksuk is a separate entity, it supports the stones above and is supported by the stones below it. Its significance comes from its meaning as a whole, not the parts that compose it; its strength lies in its unity. The inuksuk symbolizes cooperation, balance, and selflessness. That’s a pretty admirable symbol for a people—or a nation.

Short Takes: Research Coups

[Some time back, I published a series of anecdotes called “Literary Detection” (ROT, 3 January) which recounted some searches, fruitful and unfruitful, that I conducted over the years for the sources of quotations and other published documents. Over those same years, I’ve occasionally done research legwork for scholars who can’t get to New York City on their own, and two of those gigs required searches of the archives in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Columbia University. In the first instance, a client sent me to examine a specific artifact, described in the Finding Aid for the Williams collection as simply: “Vaccaro, Marion Black: Poem book, [n.p.], 1974.” In the second case, another scholar commissioned me to locate and identify the letters of Elia Kazan that were in any of the New York City collections of the famous director’s correspondents’ papers. In both instances, the signature on a document was in question because of a misreading by an archivist who wasn’t knowledgeable about the writers concerned.]

GRANGER R. BLACK/GEORGE ROBISON BLACK
(23 June 2005)

For a Tennessee Williams scholar in Mississippi for whom I’d done odd research of all kinds over the years, I went up to Butler Library at Columbia University, which houses the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. My client was doing some work on Marion Black Vaccaro (1906-70), a long-time friend and sometime traveling companion of Williams, and he’d asked me to look at an item in the Williams papers at RBML listed as a “poem book.” There turned out to be several items in the same box concerning Vaccaro, but the only ones pertinent here were the book itself, specifically a hand-written note inside, and a letter to Williams referring to the book, both attributed to “Granger R. Black” according to the RBML catalogue notation.

The “poem book” was a small bound book of blank pages, which were brown paper like that used for wrapping paper or paper bags. The contents were handwritten and the pages were unnumbered. The book contained 124 sides, including several uncut double pages but not including several missing pages (torn or cut out), inserts, and the “front” and “back” inside covers. There were many blank pages, especially in the center of the book. All in all, I would estimate that there were about 100 separate compositions in the book, including the beginning of one prose story. None of the pieces, written from both ends of the book, had titles except one poem and the story, and none was signed or otherwise identified as to author. The story incipit and many of the poems were presumably written by Vaccaro at various times, probably in the early- and mid-‘50s, but some of the poems may have been written by one or more other hands.

The actual contents of the book, which were very idiosyncratic, are irrelevant here. Of interest, however, was a handwritten note in what I came to designate as the front of the book, hand-inscribed almost four years after Vaccaro’s death:

To
Tennessee Williams
Poem book by
Marion Black Vaccaro
(etc)

From
Granger [?] R. Black
Miami, Florida
February 22, 1974

In conjunction with the book and the inscription, there was a letter from “Granger,” also dated 22 February 1974 and handwritten on stationery from Vaccaro’s last address. In the letter, addressed to “Dear Tom” (the dramatist’s real name was Thomas Lanier Williams III), Black wrote that he found the “poem book” and would have it delivered to Williams. From the letter’s content, it was apparent that it didn’t accompany the book but was mailed separately.

Now, I knew a little about Williams’s life and some of the major figures that surrounded him, but I wasn’t at all familiar with Vaccaro (except her name) or her biography, so none of the names connected with this small collection of documents and objects was known to me. I sent my client a report on what I’d found at RBML and what I could determine, and his first response was to ask: “[W]ho is Granger Black[?] Marion Black Vaccaro had a brother[,] George Robison Black, so it is not he. And her father died in the 1940s or earlier.”

I returned to RBML and reexamined the 1974 letter and the inscription in the poem book. Armed now with the name “George R. Black,” Vaccaro’s brother, I could see that that’s what the writer had signed and that “Granger” had been a misreading of the scribbled first name. Furthermore, according to the New York Times short death notice for Vaccaro and the Miami Herald obituary, the address on the letterhead of Black’s note to Williams had been Vaccaro’s last residence in Miami. Who but Vaccaro’s brother would use stationery from her home to write to Williams about a book of Vaccaro’s he’d found four years after her death? This may not have been conclusive, but in the absence of either stronger evidence in support of the identification or contrary evidence, it was convincing. I informed the librarian on duty of my conclusions, based as they were on a Williams authority’s analysis of the evidence I’d sent him, and later sent an e-mail explanation to the RBML curator raising the question and suggesting a reexamination of the attribution of the two “Granger” items. By e-mail in July, Crystal confirmed the correct identity of the signator of the letter and the inscription as “George” R. Black: “After examining the ‘poem book’ in ‘Works by Others’ [of the Tennessee Williams papers] we wish to confirm your reading of George not Granger and we will change the cataloging information accordingly.”

SADY/GADG
(10 April 2006)

Not quite a year after the Marion Black Vaccaro gig, I was back at RBML to find correspondence from Elia Kazan (1909-2003) to a number of personalities whose papers were reposited in the Columbia University manuscripts archive. This Missouri-based scholar, whom I’d previously assisted with the publication of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, had been hired by the Kazan family to catalogue the director’s letters and he hired me to do the legwork in New York City. There isn’t a Kazan archive anywhere, so finding his correspondence is a matter of searching the papers of those to whom he wrote; needless to say, a great number of Kazan’s letters and cards are in the several Tennessee Williams collections in libraries and archives around the country, and that’s where I was looking again at RBML. (Over his career, Kazan directed six of Williams’s plays and two of his films.) Much of Kazan’s correspondence is signed “Elia,” “EK” (or, often, “ek”), and, most frequently with his close acquaintances and associates like Williams, ”Gadg.”

(It was a tad amusing that in the files for Tennessee Williams, himself occasionally known to sign notes simply with the numeral “10,” are several letters from “Gadg” to “Tenn.” As I imagine many people know, “Gadg”—pronounce GADZH—was Kazan’s college nickname which he continued to use all his life. It’s from “Gadget”: he was handy with tools and repairs, which, as a scholarship student at Williams College, was one way he earned pocket money.)

Among the hand-signed notes and letters, many had signatures that were barely legible and readers could only discern that they read “Gadg” if they knew that’s what Kazan signed. In fact, one folder contained a one-page, typed letter dated 22 January 1959 addressed simply to “Tennessee,” identified both in the RBML card file and on the folder as having been hand-signed by “Sady.” (Kazan would have been in rehearsal for Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, which opened on Broadway on 10 March.) I couldn’t imagine who “Sady” could be; I’d never run across that name in all the work I’d done up to that date. (Kazan’s wife until her death was playwright Molly Day Thatcher, 1907-63, and none of their children was named Sady.) Well, of course, the signature was “Gadg,” but no examiner would ever have been able to tell that’s what the scrawl read without knowing the fact beforehand. Of course, even if I hadn’t already known Kazan’s nickname, I’d scrutinized scores of his letters by this time—over 100 by the time my participation in the project was finished—from formal business correspondence to casual notes and postcards, and I recognized his informal signature right away.

Once again, I drew the attention of the RBML staff to this misreading. The librarian on duty hand-wrote a correction on the folder cover before I left the library, and presumably the error was adjusted by the time the files were next consulted.

Maybe I ought to have sent Columbia Libraries a bill for my curatorial services!

* * * *

[My earliest scholarly research coup came in a course project when I was a grad student at NYU. For a class called 20th-Century Mise-en-Scene taught by the late Michael Kirby, I was working on a reconstruction of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson, the company’s only musical, written by Paul Green (book and lyrics) and Kurt Weill (music). It ran just nine weeks at the 44th Street Theatre, from 19 November 1936 to 16 January 1937. In the course of my research, I read all the reviews I could locate and as many accounts from participants and later scholars as I could find. I pored over photographs of the production and studied the ground plans of set designer Donald Oenslager (1902-75). I made slides of the photos and took them with me to Brooklyn (along with a rented portable projector) to interview Tony Kraber (1905-86), one of the few cast members then still alive, so he could render commentary on the pictures, which I hoped would jog his memory of the then-47-year-old production. I was also fortunate that at that time, I was acquainted with Sam Leve (1905-99), a retired set designer, who had been Oenslager’s assistant. In the end, I pieced together a description of the production from all these sources, picking out details wherever I could glean them. Kirby, then the editor of The Drama Review, proposed that I submit the paper to the journal which was planning a Group Theatre issue, and the reconstruction was published as “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson (1936)” in the winter issue of 1984 (28.4 – T104). It was my first published article.]

JOHNNY JOHNSON
(14 May 1984)

The production of Johnny Johnson, the Group Theatre’s anti-war play set during World War I, was out-of-the-ordinary for the troupe, whose reputation had been built on Realism and Naturalism. Johnny Johnson was “the only Group play that turned away from naturalism in all its elements . . . .” Lee Strasberg, who directed the production, asserted: “In . . . Johnny Johnson, we used modern art forms.” The overall effect of “Donald Oenslager’s geometric setting,” which seemed to suit Paul Green’s three-dimensional script, was striking. Composer Marc Blitzstein, who had admired Kurt Weill’s music for the show, didn’t respond as well to what he called “the hodge-podge scenic styles in the staging . . . .”

By all estimations, the vast 44th Street Theatre, with almost 1500 seats, was too big for the show. The large musical house, with its 20-foot-by-30-foot proscenium opening, necessitated Oenslager’s designing sets too big for the play. Even with the huge sets, however, the stage area had to be reduced for what was primarily an intimate show, and this was done with lighting, enhancing the ambiguity of the space surrounding the performers. The company had rehearsed the play at the Belmont Theatre, a 500-seat house on West 48th Street, in the Group’s usual acting style, a heightened Realism. Sam Leve, Oenslager’s student and assistant, recalled that though the sets and physical production were heavily expressionistic, the acting, for the most part, was realistic.

The show was conceived on an intimate scale and was rehearsed that way. Then the production moved from the intimate Belmont to the massive 44th Street Theatre, encountering Oenslager’s scenery for the first time. The move to an unfamiliar space and the large sets—eventually 14 scenes—conspired to make a difficult series of previews. Lehman Engel, the musical director for Johnny Johnson, described the consequences: “The chief problem suddenly became one of self-preservation in climbing out of world War I trenches and of making costume changes with no allowable time.”

The new theatrical form, Paul Green’s “symphonic drama” combining various theatrical elements while juxtaposing dramatic genres; Kurt Weill’s “non-musical” score; the ingenuousness of the performance, particularly the singing, and the expressionistic sets combined to make an event unequaled elsewhere on Broadway. The Group, however, obviously made an attempt to keep the production, with its 13 scene-changes, in motion, with one anonymous reviewer remarking on the “quick-changing scenes.” The New York World said: “Lee Strasberg has staged the piece with a feverish continuity that matches the script,” and this pace seems to have been greatly aided by a revolving set. The scenes changed so quickly that Russell Collins, who played Johnny, couldn’t completely change from his civilian costume in one scene in act one to a full uniform in the next. Photographs clearly show he was still wearing his civilian trousers under his military tunic until the second act. It’s also possible that some scenes may have revolved into view as the previous scene was ending. Some photographs of the very first scene, the dedication of a monument to peace, were taken with the front porch for the next scene already in the background.

No contemporary reviewer or subsequent writer over the decades since recorded the use of a revolving set. Remember, I read nearly everything published on Johnny Johnson and I never found any mention of it anywhere. The Alfredo Valente photographs of the performance I studied, however, and Donald Oenslager’s plans, which I examined, clearly showed a turntable. Furthermore, the sets shown in the drawings were specifically designed for a revolve—with several back-to-back scenes indicated. The arrangement of the scenes as Oenslager’s sketches laid them out suggested that sets were being changed behind a blind—sometimes a painted backdrop, sometimes a simple drape, and sometimes a tall piece of constructed scenery—while a scene was in progress on the other side. Assistant designer Sam Leve personally confirmed for me that this was the case. And though actor Tony Kraber, who played several roles in the production, didn’t specifically recall a revolve, he agreed that there must have been one when he saw the production photos. This was my own, small revelation for the account of this historic production. And, what’s more, I got it on the record in the TDR publication of the original essay.

[I made some reference to this first publication in my article “Writing” (ROT, 9 April 2010). This, however, wasn’t actually my first research revelation. That happened in the army when I discovered a fact that no one else had seen because no one had ever assembled all the evidence in one place at the same time. The work was classified at the time I did it, but I think I can reveal it now—it was almost 40 years ago in a world that no longer exists—and maybe I’ll tell it on ROT one of these days.]