Introduction
I’ll Take Manhattan
On the Sidewalks of New York
A Hole in the Ground
License to Thrill
Rental Illness
Man (and Woman) in Black
A Helluva Town
Stayin’ Alive
The Turnaround
Carpe Noctem
The Real March
Madness
In the Hoods
I’ve Always Depended on the Knishes of Strangers
Twelve Angry New Yorkers
Urban Dictionary
I Saw Mommy Kissing the Tree Man
Humidity City
Tails of New York
Wall Street Bull
Sects and the City
Graffiti Goes Pro
Treadmills, Trans Fats, and Treatments
Time’s Winged Taxicab
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Text copyright © 2015 Laura Pedersen
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form by
any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
taping, or any information storage and retrieval system—without written permission
of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pedersen, Laura.
Life in New York : how I learned to love squeegee men, token suckers, trash twisters, and subway sharks / Laura Pedersen.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-936218-15-8 (paperback)
1. Pedersen, Laura. 2. Pedersen, Laura--Homes and haunts--New York (State)--New York. 3. Novelists, American--20th century--Biography. 4. Novelists, American--21st century--Biography. 5. Floor traders (Finance)--United States--Biography. I. Title.
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2015009131
Printed in the United States of America
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Cover illustration by Alex Asfour
Cover design by Jessica Townsend
Fulcrum Publishing
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Introduction
In 1923 my Danish grandfather was working as a kitchen assistant aboard a ship that docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, when he decided to jump off and try his luck in New York City. It was the Golden Age of Ocean Liners, Baseball, and Excess, when liquor flowed freely, despite Prohibition, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald adored the Plaza Hotel. They drank there, dined there, and even cavorted fully clothed in the Pulitzer Fountain out front one wild night. Dorothy Parker was cracking wise over at the Algonquin Round Table, a cultural explosion that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance was flourishing uptown, and a flock of Southdown sheep grazed in Central Park. Within a day, Grandpa had a job at a popular Scandinavian smorgasbord restaurant.
My father was born a few blocks from the George Washington Bridge in 1931 and grew up in Manhattan during the Golden Age of Comic Books, Radio Serials, and Skyscrapers, when the Battle for the Heights played out between the Bank of Manhattan and the Chrysler Building, only to be eclipsed by the Empire State Building. (New
Yorkers called it the “Empty State Building” since it wouldn’t turn a profit for twenty years.) It was the Depression, and the family frequented Horn & Hardart automats, which dispensed sandwiches, baked beans, pie, and even hot beverages to millions of customers cheaply and efficiently. He was thrilled to read the first Superman and Batman comic books, which were set in Metropolis and Gotham, both modeled
on Manhattan, and listen to the adventures of the Shadow and the Green Hornet on the radio. Later, when my father went into the army, his mom tidied up his room and threw away all the first edition comics.
After fighting in the Korean War and attending college in Manhattan on the GI Bill, Dad took a job as a court reporter in Buffalo. So I was raised in Western New York during the Golden Age of Serial Killers, Skyjackings, and Disaster Films. It was also the age of steel factories and auto plants packing up and moving overseas. By the time high school commencement rolled around, the local unemployment rate was a whopping 12 percent. Thousands of people would show up for a single job opening, and, all things being unequal, men usually awarded them to other men since they were considered to be “the breadwinners.”
The dilapidated War Memorial baseball stadium featured Unemployment Nights during which the jobless hordes made use of discounted tickets to cheer on the minor league Buffalo Bisons baseball team. Meantime, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra campaigned to be adopted by another city. A first. No takers. Bethlehem Steel, that polestar of American manufacturing, imposed a final round of layoffs and then raised an upside-down American flag out front, the international signal of distress. Holy smokestacks! A billboard near city hall asked, “Will the Last Worker Out of Western New York Please Turn Out the Light?”
As 1983 drew to a close, I departed a city with a high suicide rate for one with an even higher homicide rate by hopping a Greyhound bus to Manhattan. People said I was crazy. Why trade blizzards and breadlines for garbage strikes and gangbangers? New York was the dystopian hellscape of Death Wish, Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Saturday Night Fever, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Superfly, The Godfather Part I and Part II, The Warriors, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Fort Apache the Bronx, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. In Annie Hall an actor explains that he moved from New York to Los Angeles because he did Shakespeare in the Park and got mugged. It was a far cry from the sublime, exhilarating, wholesome 1940s New York of On the Town. Or even the 1950s New York of West Side Story, where rival gangs displayed their ferocity through balletic dance moves and
kick-ass finger snapping. New York’s nickname of “Fun City” had recently been changed to “Fear City.”
It was a hotbed of arsonists, muggers, rapists, looters, flesh peddlers, flimflammers, purse snatchers, carjackers, streetwalkers, glue sniffers, speed freaks, anarchists, junkies, mobsters, chain grabbers, chop shops, disco queens, dope peddlers, porn stars, Peeping Toms, cross-dressers, jazz hounds, ad men, union goons, radical feminists, atonal composers, street gangs, bag ladies, Bowery bums, Black Panthers, black beauties, bad trips, dime bags, damn Yankees, Hare Krishnas, Hells Angels, angry prophets, crooked cops, punk rockers, psychic stockbrokers, and laid-off dockworkers; a rogue island disintegrating amidst heat waves, killer smog, gaping potholes, collapsing highways, lead paint, racial tension, ethnic warfare, political terrorism, payoffs, gunplay, sirens, slums, brothels, bathhouses, drug dens, bomb blasts, switchblades, cockfights, crack corners, bankruptcy, corruption, roaches, rodents, pigeons, graffiti, litter, and decay. New York had made international news with a near-bankruptcy, a world famous serial killer, a notorious garbage strike, multiple incidents of police brutality, and a citywide blackout followed by riots.
The city was in its late-middle-age Elizabeth Taylor period – formerly glamorous but now broke, bloated, and drug-addicted, with only her diehard fans remaining. It was impossible to know if the Babylonian Burg, with its social contract under siege, was in a death spiral or hitting rock bottom prior to the greatest comeback in history. Much like Liz’s followers, residents couldn’t tell if they were going to get White Diamonds and Sapphires or Black Death and lemons.
I found an entry-level job as a data clerk on the trading floor of the American Stock Exchange that paid slightly below the poverty line and signed up for night classes at New York University, which students not so jokingly called New York Unemployment.
A full course load cost $8,000 a year. Now tuition is $64,000 a year, which Midwesterners consider particularly outrageous for a school with no football team. (The cost of housing varies since a few students can usually be found living rent free in the Bobst Library.) So I got a terrific deal, right? Not exactly, because it has all vanished from my brain – everything from
psychology and reverse psychology to managerial accounting and Mendel’s laws. The transitive property of inequality disappeared into thin air, while Isaiah Berlin and the Berlin blockade may have been second cousins for all I know.
However, I clearly remember three decades of effervescent New York life – the illegal sublets, token suckers, squeegee men, storefront-window fortune tellers, subway musicians, sidewalk vendors, messianic street preachers, the Botanical Garden’s annual train show, New York Post headlines such as here we ho again (about the sexploits of former Luv Guv Eliot Spitzer), and a musical where the entire cast careened around on roller skates. Then, as if New York needed one more act, the circus would come to town – elephants lumbering through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel at midnight with the garish fluorescent lights bouncing off their gold forehead medallions and trunks proudly swaying, followed by eight ponies, three stiltwalkers, and a Watusi. This being New York, the circus had to pay a toll, but there was no extra charge for the trunks.
Chapter 1
I’ll Take Manhattan
As my bus lurched toward the Lincoln Tunnel a sign proclaimed: no trucks over 12’ 6”. Underneath, in equally large letters, was painted: we mean it! Obviously I was entering a reckless, self-destructive society that couldn’t or, more likely, wouldn’t follow the kind of simple direction I’d learned in kindergarten. Back home in Buffalo, when my teacher told us not to eat paste she didn’t need to tack on a threat. And upon exiting the Thruway near the house where I grew up it wasn’t unusual to see a woman hand her entire purse over to the toll taker if she’d just had her nails done. After the Lincoln Tunnel sign I was half expecting a troll to ask me a riddle before I was allowed to enter the Big Bad City.
Having been raised minutes from the border I probably had more in common with Canadians than your average New Yorker. For instance, we Buffalonians know that if you play goalie they have to pick you for the team. Also, that peeing in a snowsuit to keep warm does not work the same way it does in a wetsuit – this will just make you colder and cause no small measure of embarrassment all around. I also knew that nose breathing in winter is better than mouth breathing for staying warm and hydrated. And that if you forget your lock de-icer you have to find a guy to pee in the lock for you. Clearly I was going to need a new skill set in this city of sharp right angles.
Of course, I wasn’t the first out-of-towner to arrive in Manhattan with nothing except high hopes. Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian
explorer and part-time pirate who was working for the French, dropped anchor in 1524. He was met by Native Americans who’d inhabited the area since around 10,000 BC, developing into the Iroquoian and Algonquin cultures. Verrazzano was followed by English explorer Henry Hudson, who was searching for a route to the Orient on behalf of investors from the Netherlands, and staked a land claim in 1609.
A local Lenni Lenape Indian told him the place was called Manna-hata, which is usually translated as “hilly island,” albeit another version holds that the name came from a similar Indian word for “place of general inebriation.” Eventually the hills would be mostly razed for development, but in its long and flamboyant history the city has certainly never lacked for spirits. That’s why there’s a famous cocktail called a Manhattan, while no one goes into a bar and orders a Minneapolis, a Des Moines, or a Moline.
The Dutch first settled in the lower part of Manhattan, now known as the Financial District, and it didn’t take long for the world’s most famous trade to occur. In 1626, Peter Minuit, the director of the Dutch colony, bought Manhattan from the Indians for goods valued at around $24. However, one could just as easily argue that the adroit traders here were the Indians since they didn’t believe in land ownership so much as stewardship – and therefore the Europeans were trying to buy something that couldn’t be bought in the first place.
Along with the desirable real estate came the magnificent place where the continent met the ocean, and created the world’s finest natural harbor. It was blessed with deep channels, sheltered ships from storms by extending inland for seventeen miles, and was rarely clogged with ice or else fogbound.
The colony of New Netherland, with its capital of New Amsterdam located at the southern tip of Manhattan, was exceptional from the start. Its reason for being didn’t stem from a search for religious freedom, an escape from political strife, or sons being drafted into the army but rather for the sole purpose of commerce. In fact, it would take eight years before anyone got around to building a church, though not because of any labor or lumber shortages, since several dozen saloons had gone up easily enough.
Originally focused around fur trading, but quickly expanding into agriculture and slave trafficking, commerce continued to trump conscience and political allegiances in the bustling settlement. Thus it also served as a popular haven for pirates, with the infamous Captain William Kidd owning a house on Pearl Street and a pew in Trinity Church. The citizenry was a rowdy polyglot, speaking eighteen different languages and frequenting a profusion of taverns, drinking clubs, and grogshops by the time the British came calling in 1664. Gathered in the harbor were only 450 soldiers aboard four ships, but the 8,000 residents couldn’t be bothered with whose face was on their money so long as they were able to keep making it. Director-General Peter Stuyvesant was forced to give up the whole settlement to the British so the locals could go right on farming and trading. Even Stuyvesant’s seventeen-year-old son welcomed the English invaders. The Dutch city was soon renamed after the Duke of York, brother to King Charles II.
Old Man Stuyvesant duly packed up and paddled back to Old Netherland to fill out the requisite “loss of colony” paperwork. However, after tidying up his career-ending affairs, Stuyvesant returned to his farm in the colony where he and his family spent their remaining years as full-fledged New Yorkers in the capital of capitalism. In return for his service, New York named the large residential development now located on the site Stuyvesant Town, or “Stuy Town” in local parlance, while Stuyvesant High School is one of the finest public secondary schools in the city, and a neighborhood in Brooklyn is called Stuyvesant Heights.
There were two wars still to come between the locals and their new landlords, but by 1820 New York was the leading port of entry for Europe’s exports to America. Its entrepreneurial residents were the first to get cutting-edge ideas and inventions from Europe and capitalize or improve on them. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the city became the transfer point for crops and merchandise going between the Midwest and the rest of the East Coast as well as Europe. Soon planters in the South began sending their cotton directly to wholesalers in New York, who would take their commissions and ship it onward to the mills
of New England. New York was fast becoming the most influential city in the Western World and a magnet for ambitious people from around the globe.
Chapter 2
On the Sidewalks of New York
My entry point to Manhattan from Buffalo was not the grandiose Grand Central Terminal but rather the grotesque Port Authority, a monolithic bus depot on the West Side in Midtown. This steel and concrete block constructed in the style known as Maximum Security Prison shows up on most lists of the World’s Ugliest Buildings, and if somewhere there is indeed an architectural monstrosity slightly uglier, I have yet to see it. That said, the inside was even worse. Imagine an Off Track Betting parlor in the lobby of a flophouse.
I arrived in New York City in January 1984 BC – Before Computerization. At least it was before personal computers had landed in every home, store, and office. Back then computers were large, expensive machines used by universities, corporations, and governments for math problems
, credit card authorization, military purposes, and weather forecasting; a far cry from the porn and cat-photo delivery systems we know them as today. Before the Internet and electronic signage, information booths were necessary for getting subway, bus, and train route particulars and track numbers, especially since there never seemed to be any maps in stock. Half-mile-long lines snaked from kiosks staffed by one or two employees who acted not bored but truly annoyed, as if you were keeping them from something much more important, such as finalizing a nuclear arms treaty or decoding the human genome. They were downright surly, and if you didn’t understand what was being said, their only concession was to talk louder and faster.
There were no mobile phones affordable to us mere peasants, and the payphone banks at the Port Authority were monopolized by pimps and drug dealers. If you did manage to commandeer one, an intrepid bystander would steal your calling card number and sell it to people who would make several thousand dollars’ worth of phone calls to the Caribbean within the next ninety minutes.
A statue of actor Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, the lunchbox-carrying, working-class bus driver from The Honeymooners, stands outside the Port Authority to help further set its tone as the place where dreams do indeed come true. I wasn’t the first recession refugee seeking self-creation, reinvention, and public service on a national scale, or to become “one singular sensation” as defined by A Chorus Line. In fact, I was probably the tenth that day, and it was only noon. There were already enough expatriates from Western New York to start our own enclave called Little Buffalo and set up chicken wing stands. But we economic exiles were prepared to hunker down and prove ourselves. Except for people like my friend Mary, who moved to New York for the express purpose of letting some time elapse in order to clear points off her driver’s license.
Life in New York Page 1
