The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  Now Mrs. Astor, 104, is at the center of a bitter intergenerational dispute that has become public. In a lawsuit, one of her grandsons has accused her son of mistreating her and turning her final years into a grim shadow of the glittery decades that went before.

  The grandson, Philip Marshall, accuses his father, Anthony Marshall—a Broadway producer and former C.I.A. employee who is 82—of failing to fill Mrs. Astor’s prescriptions, stripping her apartment of artwork, confining the dogs she doted on to the pantry, reducing the number of staff members looking after her, and forcing her to sleep in chilly misery on a couch that smells of urine.

  In court papers, Philip Marshall says that his father “has turned a blind eye to her, intentionally and repeatedly ignoring her health, safety, personal and household needs, while enriching himself with millions of dollars.’’

  Philip Marshall asks that Anthony Marshall be removed as Mrs. Astor’s legal guardian and replaced by Annette de la Renta, a friend of Mrs. Astor’s who is married to the designer Oscar de la Renta, and JPMorgan Chase Bank.

  The allegations shocked the circles in which Mrs. Astor once moved, simply because they involved Mrs. Astor, who always guarded her privacy, even though she was one of the most public figures in New York. Her name alone denoted power and old wealth. She is said to have thrown a would-be mugger off balance by saying, “Excuse me, we’ve not been introduced properly. I’m Mrs. Astor.’’

  She became Mrs. Astor with her third husband. She had divorced the first, and the second had died. The third, Vincent Astor, was the son and heir of John Jacob Astor, who died on the Titanic, and whose fortune had begun in fur trading and real estate. Vincent Astor bequeathed Mrs. Astor $60 million for herself and an equal amount for a foundation “for the alleviation of human suffering.’’

  But it is her suffering that Philip Marshall describes in court papers. There are allegations that her son vetoed purchases of a new outfit when she turned 104, of cosmetics, of hats and socks. There are allegations that he had curbed her physical therapy sessions and stopped her injections for anemia.

  Vartan Gregorian, a former president of the New York Public Library who is now the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, said the last time he visited her, last year, was an unexpected emotional experience.

  “When she was told it was I, she opened one eye,” he said. “She kissed me. She said, ‘I love you.’ I said, ‘I love you, too.’ I kissed her hand, and broke down. I’d never seen her in that weak position. I’d always seen her triumphant. She was, will always be, the first lady of New York society.”

  ENTERTAINERS, ARTISTS AND WRITERS

  On Rap Star’s Final Ride, Homage Is Marred by a Scuffle

  By IAN FISHER | March 19, 1997

  Actor Jamal Woolard, shown here in Fort Greene, played rapper Biggie Smalls in the movie “Notorious.”

  CHRISTOPHER G. WALLACE, THE BROOKLYN tough who became the million-selling rap star known as Biggie Smalls and the Notorious B.I.G., was driven in a hearse yesterday for a final ride through the streets where he grew up. Several thousand people mourned both for him and for the violence that has shaken the rap world.

  The procession itself was marred by a brief clash between the police and several dozen people, which erupted around the corner from Mr. Wallace’s childhood home in Fort Greene. The incident began in a chaotic swirl of people flooding onto Fulton Street, when a group of teenagers jumped onto several parked cars and a Dumpster and began dancing shortly after Mr. Wallace’s motorcade passed by.

  After officers trying to remove people from atop the cars scuffled with several men, Vanessa Edwards, 28, stood with tears streaming down her face and wailed, “He wouldn’t have wanted it like this!’’

  The police arrested 10 people, including a reporter who was covering the procession for The New York Times, and no one was seriously hurt. But tensions between the police and residents festered into the evening along Fulton Street, amid complaints that the police had used excessive force, including one officer who pounded a man on the head repeatedly with the butt end of a can of pepper spray.

  The scuffles, though, stood in sharp contrast to the rest of the almost regal proceedings for Mr. Wallace, who at 24 was one of rap’s biggest stars, making musical capital of the violence that surrounded him growing up. He was killed 10 days ago in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles.

  The mourners who turned up along the motorcade route in Brooklyn—from grade-schoolers to grandparents—said they regarded him not so much as a “gangsta” rapper but as a hero who had overcome his own early drug dealing to become rich and famous on the strength of his talent.

  “He was kind of a role model to all of us,” said Karla Boston, 11, who was standing with two of her sixth-grade classmates on St. James Place. “He found it to the big leagues. He found a way to get out of this neighborhood.

  “I figured he tried hard and he’s kind of giving us hope,” she added.

  A Bronze Plaque In Brooklyn Marks George Gershwin’s Birthplace

  By JOHN S. WILSON | September 23, 1963

  A BRONZE PLAQUE MARKING THE TWO-STORY house in Brooklyn where George Gershwin was born will be unveiled at 11 a.m., Thursday, the 65th anniversary of the birth of the composer, who died on July 11, 1937. By proclamation of Abe Stark, borough president of Brooklyn, Thursday will be George Gershwin Day.

  The plaque is a presentation of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, of which Mr. Gershwin was a member. During the ceremonies the glee club of the nearby George Gershwin Junior High School will sing Gershwin songs.

  The composer wrote the music for such shows as “Of Thee I Sing,” “Girl Crazy” and “Strike Up the Band.” His bigger works included “An American in Paris,” “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Porgy and Bess.”

  George Gershwin lived in Brooklyn for only two or possibly three years before the family moved back to Manhattan.

  The house, between Sutter and Belmont Avenues, was surrounded by trees when the Gershwins lived there. George Gershwin’s brother, Ira, remembers eating grapes from a vine that grew in the fenced yard surrounding the house. He played in an open field on the Sutter Avenue side. The house had a front room, a dining room, a kitchen and possibly a maid’s room on the ground floor. Upstairs there were three or four bedrooms, one of which was rented to a Mr. Taffelstein for $4 a week.

  Today the house is hemmed in by other buildings. The only remnant of the open field where Ira Gershwin played is a space wider than any of the alleyways in the neighborhood, too wide for a driveway but not wide enough for a lot. In 65 years the semi-suburban atmosphere of the street has changed. Open space has given way to a solid row of buildings. Stores in the once predominantly Jewish neighborhood now display signs in English, Hebrew and Spanish.

  Memories of a Rock Star: My First Year in New York

  By LOU REED | September 17, 2000

  WHEN I MOVED INTO MY FIRST NEW YORK apartment, my uncle gave me a cot and a folding chair. I had been working as a copy editor for a divorce lawyer for two weeks to build up rent money. With $200 in my pocket, I quit and got the apartment ($45 a month) with a friend. It was one room with a bathtub. The bathroom was in the hall and unusable. We took electricity from the hall lighting fixture. There was no heat, but there was a window that overlooked the street three floors below.

  Much of my income came from selling envelopes of sugar to girls I met at clubs, claiming it was heroin. This led to hours of feigned stonedness. What happened to the original drugs is another story.

  I slept in a used Navy peacoat and did what laundry I had at a dealer’s house on East Sixth Street, until a jealous lover shot my friend’s leg off with a shotgun blast through the door. This caused some consternation in our crowd, and eventually eight of us banded together and moved en masse to a new apartment on Grand Street. There I slept on a small cut-up mattress that rested on the floor. It made me nervous because we had rats and I worried about being bit. At this point the Velvet Und
erground had sprung into being. The junkies who lived below us honored our first job by robbing the entire band of everything that was not with us at the gig.

  The next apartment was on East 10th Street. This was a real apartment, $65 a month. I made the mistake of letting Ondine stay there once when I was out of town and returned to find the apartment flooded with water and a comatose body in the bathtub. Jimmy Smith had taken all my belongings. Rotten Rita had carved a poem on the front door, which hung off its hinges. The amphetamine elves had Magic Markered the walls, and the landlord had left the notice of eviction Scotch taped to the working stove. I still had my guitar and my peacoat and my B.A. in English.

  Miss Bankhead Returns, Purring

  By EUGENE ARCHER | December 6, 1964

  “HAND ME THE TELEPHONE, DARLING,” SAID Tallulah Bankhead. It was only two feet away from her yoga perch, but before her startled visitor could oblige, the maid had darted around the pastel furnishing, and was brandishing the Princess. “Thanks,” cooed the Buddha, accepting her alms. “Darling” she repeated, this time addressing the receiver, “I’m talking to the nicest gentleman from The New York Times, and I’m trying to be tactful as hell about the film.”

  Bankhead is definitely back. Back, this time, from a 10-week sojourn in England, where she played for Hammer Brothers in something called, to her chagrin, “Die! Die! My Darling!”

  Curled up on her ladylike couch, rich brown hair streaming on either side of her big, bad eyes, the effect was decidedly kittenish, and her celebrated vocabulary rumbled forth in an alarming purr.

  “I adore Huntley-Brinkley,” she explained, turning on the sound full blast. “I hope it doesn’t drive you mad. I don’t know how I survived in England without the news. The British press, of course, were awfully nice to me, they always are, except when they say I’m a lousy actress, and sometimes I agree with them.”

  Her attention was momentarily arrested by an item on the news, involving a group of children in Eighth Street. Tallulah raised an eyebrow. “That’s no place for children.”

  “I didn’t choose this script, darling, it was forced on me, but my friends thought it was rather good. It isn’t comedy though, nobody is writing good comedy these days except Iris Murdoch.”

  At the point, she had been talking nonstop for two hours. “You really must be disarming,” she accused “because you made me miss Huntley-Brinkley. Oh, well. Come back again, and next time we’ll play bridge.”

  You Must Remember This: A Sign Is Not Just a Sign

  By MANNY FERNANDEZ | June 25, 2006

  YESTERDAY, ON HUMPHREY BOGART PLACE, there was only one fedora in sight. Yet the rain came down hard, the way it does in old movies, and people stood beneath their umbrellas looking for the ghost of Sam Spade.

  They were not quite world-weary—this was the Upper West Side, after all—but they were at least a little wet.

  The block of 103rd Street between Broadway and West End Avenue was named in honor of Bogart, the legendary actor who, 49 years after his death, remains an ageless representative of another time, when the world had a bit more grace and a few decent gin joints. Bogart grew up on this block in the early 1900’s, in a four-story brownstone at 245 West 103rd Street.

  This city usually greets the naming of a street with a collective yawn. But the official unveiling of Humphrey Bogart Place was something else entirely, part block party, part film symposium, part history lesson. About 150 people gathered for the ceremony, and a hush of nervous excitement fell over the crowd when the chairman of the city’s Housing Authority, Tino Hernandez, politely asked the people standing behind him to make room for the woman walking up the sidewalk.

  She was the event’s special guest, Bogart’s widow, Lauren Bacall. She looked elegant in a black suit, elegant and dry, with their son, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, by her side.

  “It certainly was surprising,” she told the crowd of the honor. “Bogie would never have believed it.”

  Bogart’s parents—Belmont DeForest Bogart and Maud Humphrey—bought the brownstone in 1898, a year before Bogart was born. His father, a surgeon, used the first floor as his office and kept a pigeon coop on the roof. His mother, an illustrator, had a studio on the third floor. The brownstone is now owned by the Housing Authority and is part of a low-income housing development known as the Douglass Rehabs. Four families live in the building. There is a small garden in the back with a red-painted picnic table and a sign on a bulletin board that reminds tenants that exterminations are conducted on the fourth Saturday of the month.

  Shards of a Life in 5F

  By MANNY FERNANDEZ | October 2, 2005

  RUSSELL AARONSON NEEDED A NEW BATH-room sink a few years ago. The old one in his Upper West Side studio apartment was a turn-of-the-century model, a cast-iron, white-enamel basin with two brass faucets that had outlived its usefulness. But he could never imagine simply throwing it out. After all, he explained, ‘’It was James Dean’s sink.’’

  The lives—and even the bathroom fixtures—of Dean, a movie icon who died 50 years ago on Friday, and Mr. Aaronson, a Manhattan waiter, have been intimately and inextricably linked by a twist of fate, a stroke of good luck or the whims of that other force of nature, the New York real estate market.

  The connection between the two men is Apartment 5F.

  Mr. Aaronson resides in the same tiny studio at 19 West 68th Street where Dean lived in the early 1950’s. It is a cramped unit on the top floor of a five-story brownstone walk-up off Central Park. There, in the corner, was where Dean slept, a matador’s cape draped over a pair of bull horns on the wall above him.

  There, nowadays, Mr. Aaronson’s 7-year-old son sleeps, the cape and horns replaced by two framed photos of Dean and a wooden plaque from West Side Little League.

  It’s not easy living in Dean’s old apartment. Strangers frequently drop by and ask if they can take a look around.

  It’s not easy living in Dean’s old apartment. Strangers frequently drop by and ask if they can take a look around. Mr. Aaronson said he had given tours to about 100 Dean fans over the years. Then there is the graffiti, the personal and often mysterious notes people scrawl in pen, pencil and lipstick on the white-painted wall downstairs across from the mail slots. ‘’Jim Dean, thanks, you got me back on track,” Clint wrote on July 24, 2004.

  But Mr. Aaronson does not mind the visits or the graffiti. He has become a kind of curator of an unofficial Dean museum since he moved in 31 years ago. He has attended Dean tributes in Fairmount, Ind., the small farm town where the actor was raised, and even met Dean’s first cousin, Marcus Winslow. And when it came time to figure out what to do with the old sink, he decided to put it in the trunk of a friend’s car and drive it 750 miles to the Fairmount Historical Museum, where it is now on display.

  ‘’You might say,” said Mr. Aaronson of the loyalty he feels to the former tenant, “it’s a welcome obligation.”

  TriBeCa Yawns Hello to Film Studio

  By CONSTANCE L. HAYS | May 6, 1990

  Robert DeNiro co-founded the TriBeCa Film Festival in 2002.

  TRUMPETED AS HOLLYWOOD ON THE HUDSON and organized by Robert De Niro, a former coffee warehouse in lower Manhattan opened this year as the TriBeCa Film Center, with production centers on seven floors and a stylish restaurant, the Tribeca Grill, on the ground floor. Yet for all the attention people in the neighborhood are paying to it, it might still be the warehouse.

  “He’s not the first celebrity in the neighborhood,” said Dorothea Nicholas, a resident of the Independence Plaza apartment complex across the street.

  Across TriBeCa, the area’s supposed leap into the limelight is mostly met with an attitude of boredom, occasionally broken by a comment about the economic opportunities of such a change.

  Mr. De Niro, the actor, “lives in the neighborhood and has for over 10 years,” said Jane Rosenthal, executive vice president of TriBeCa Productions, the movie company that anchors the center. “It was really just a matter of being in the neighborhoo
d.”

  At Greenwich Street Video, where Mr. De Niro has a membership and occasionally rents his movies, the management applauded the film center. “It used to be a bombed-out warehouse,” said Maria Hogan, who has worked at the store five years. When Mr. De Niro, who lives a block away on Hudson Street, wanted to rent his first videocassette, she added, he did not have to produce two forms of identification and a utility bill like the average customer.

  Part of the local indifference to stardom may be that New Yorkers tend to recognize people more readily for their success in something other than show business, Ms. Kearney said. She added: “In New York, you’re much more likely to hear someone say, ‘Hey, there’s Susan Sontag,’ and in L.A. it’s, ‘There’s Danny DeVito.’ There’s a lot more intellectual celebrity.”

  “Wonder Years,” By Way of Bed-Stuy

  By JOHN FREEMAN GILL | December 4, 2005

  BEDFORD-STUYVESANT IS USED TO HAVING its reputation defined by outsiders. For years this Brooklyn neighborhood had the rap of being so perilous a landscape that in 1980 a Long Island boy named Billy Joel sang, “I’ve been stranded in the combat zone/I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone.” By contrast, in the current overheated housing market, Bed-Stuy has been ballyhooed as the last frontier of affordable brownstones, a place overrun by real estate speculators panning for original wainscoting.

  With the UPN television show “Everybody Hates Chris,” the country is finally seeing a representation of Bed-Stuy shaped by one of its own: Chris Rock, the show’s co-creator and narrator, on whose Decatur Street childhood the program is loosely based. The struggle to make ends meet is played for laughs, so much so that at times the show has the misty tone of an asphalt-jungle “Wonder Years.” Any sense of true jeopardy in the rose-tinted ghetto portrayed on screen is so slight that one episode hinges on little more than Chris’s misadventures at the local Laundromat.