The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  The reality was far more complex. During those years, street crime was as much a part of the scene as the neighborhood’s 2,600 vacant and abandoned residential buildings, according to a study by the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation; in 1983, the rate of violent crime in Bed-Stuy was 80 percent higher than the citywide average, with nearly twice as many murders per capita as in the city as a whole.

  “The image of people afraid to come out of their homes because of drugs and gang warfare was not the reality of how we were living every day,” said Doug Jones, a 37-year-old real estate agent who grew up in a brownstone on McDonough Street, adding, “It was very apple pie, nondescript and even a little boring.”

  Trying to Shake a Stereotype But Keep On Being Rosie Perez

  By PETER APPLEBOME | February 14, 1999

  Rosie Perez talks to students at LaGuardia High School on the Upper West Side.

  ON A WATER-LOGGED DAY IN BROOKLYN, everything seems muted and muffled—the grays and browns of the buildings, the soggy drumbeat of the rain, the leaden thwock of the car wheels shooting out sprays of oily water as they rumble over manhole covers.

  And then there is Rosie Perez, who, rain or shine, is about as muted and muffled as a stick of dynamite on a short fuse.

  “All the time, all the time,” she shot back when asked if she worries about being stereotyped as a feisty, foul-mouthed, working-class Latina, the Rosie Perez character she has played in most of her films. “Sometimes I really want to ask the studio heads, ‘Did you earn your college degree or did you pay for it? Are you stupid?’”

  When she started acting, Ms. Perez was advised to take classes to lose her Brooklyn inflections and mannerisms. Instead, she has built an improbable acting career, which began with a chance encounter with the director Spike Lee, on being pretty much what she is: an intense, voluble, working-class Puerto Rican from Bushwick who is indelibly from her own unfashionable patch of turf.

  She was born somewhere between 1964 and ‘66—she declines to be more precise—in the middle of a family of 11 children in Bushwick. Ms. Perez apparently spent part of the time living in group homes or with relatives and got into her share of trouble, but looks back on a place that for all its rough edges was definitely a neighborhood.

  “I never thought of it as a tough neighborhood,” she said. “I never thought I was poor until someone told me I was.”

  Casting director Sheila Jaffe said Ms. Perez at times may risk being perceived as too outspoken and aggressive for her own good.

  But she thinks even if Ms. Perez does not conform to the Hollywood norm of user-friendly, blue-eyed blondes, she is smart enough and talented enough to make things work.

  Seinfeld, Come Home?

  By JOHN TIERNEY | March 5, 1995

  Jerry Seinfeld on West 78th Street and Broadway, not far from his apartment which is on 81st Street and Central Park West.

  A NEW HOPE GRIPPED NEW YORKERS EVER since an item appeared in Liz Smith’s gossip column in January. “Jerry Seinfeld is looking to make a permanent move back to New York City,” she revealed.

  I can understand the excitement, because I, too, have longed for Jerry and the gang to come home. “Seinfeld” always struck me as a troubling paradox. Yes, it captures the travails of Manhattan better than any show ever on television, but it is written and filmed in Los Angeles. Yes, the characters Jerry and George seem to be quintessential New Yorkers, the kind who believe, as John Updike put it, “that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding.” But the characters’ creators and real-life counterparts—Seinfeld and his friend Larry David, the show’s executive producer—appear to be doing just fine in California.

  After the rumors of their move started, I went out to Studio City to talk to Seinfeld and David, hoping to hear how anxious they are to return, how impossible it is to do good work without the city’s daily stimulation. As they sat in their office, where they work at facing desks, Seinfeld explained that he had indeed suggested moving the whole show back to New York for several episodes or maybe even a whole season. The attempts to import the Upper West Side—weekly shipments of H & H bagels, a new $800,000 exterior set this season simulating the sidewalks of Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues—were no substitute for the real thing. But now it looked as if the move would be too complicated for the rest of the staff.

  “People have really bought into this Hollywood life style,” Seinfeld said. He insisted that he still considers himself a New Yorker and regards his 14 years in Los Angeles as an extended business trip. David, though, said he wasn’t sure if he would ever move back—an ambivalence that deeply concerned me, particularly when he said that he hadn’t been to New York for two years. How could the Brooklynite responsible for George’s neurotic New York psyche be content … in Los Angeles?

  “George is more or less based on you, isn’t he?” I asked David. “I just can’t see George out here. Of all the characters, he’s the one who shouldn’t be able to survive anywhere but New York.”

  “He definitely is a strong side of me,” David said. “George is a good vehicle for a lot of the sick things you would think about doing. No, I couldn’t really imagine him out here, either. Probably he’d yell at somebody in his car, and they would follow him home and kill him.”

  Letterman Celebrates New York

  By BILL CARTER | October 1, 2001

  LATE IN THE SHOW ON HIS FIRST NIGHT BACK after the attacks on New York, following an emotional monologue about the anguish and rage of the country and of New York City, David Letterman broke for a commercial.

  With the microphones off, Regis Philbin, a guest on Mr. Letterman’s “Late Show” on CBS, leaned over to talk to him.

  “He was in agony,” Mr. Philbin said later about the show on Sept. 17. “He was so worried about that first segment and what he had said. He was really agonized over that, over whether he could possibly say anything that would matter at a time like this. I said: ‘No, it was great. You spoke from the gut.’ But I don’t think he believed me.”

  Mr. Letterman, who even in the best of times is afflicted with a chronic self-effacement, said that he had come back on the air and spoken that way to the television audience simply because the mayor had urged New Yorkers to get back as soon as possible to their normal lives.

  Jerry Seinfeld was in the midst of a concert tour with his new stand-up comedy act. “I canceled a bunch of dates,” he said. “It was a very hard decision, when you could go back to doing comedy. Then I saw the things Letterman was doing. He handled it so well.”

  In dealing with the catastrophe Mr. Letterman had an advantage of sorts: he was in New York, while Jay Leno was 3,000 miles away in Burbank, Calif. So Mr. Letterman could tell a discreet New York joke and pull it off. He could take advantage of his association with the city, built up over eight years of lambasting New York with the particular kind of humor that natives could love only from one of their own. “Over the years and perhaps unintentionally, ‘Late Show’ has become a celebration of New York,” said Rob Burnett, one of the show’s executive producers.

  New York has provided Mr. Letterman with targets like taxi drivers who don’t believe in brakes and hot-dog vendors with antifreeze in their water, and a ready cast of characters for comedy in the streets, like shopkeepers and tourists.

  No joke could touch directly on the tragedy in New York. Instead of selecting from-the-headlines topics for his popular Top 10 lists, as has been the custom, Mr. Letterman gravitated to off-the-wall topics, like “Top 10 Things That Almost Rhyme With Hat” (No. 7: “meat”) and “Top 10 Signs Your Wife Is Having an Affair With the Jolly Green Giant (No. 3: “Your last two kids have been green”). None of this has been heavily planned, Ms. Brennan said. “We just come in in the morning,” she said, “and sort of see how its going to go.”

  “Over the years and perhaps unintentionally, ‘Late Show’ has become a celebration of New York.”

  Predictably, Mr. Letterman does not think it has been going especially w
ell. “He hates the shows, as always,” Mr. Burnett said. “The president and the mayor have said we need to get back to normal, so Dave is doing his best by hating the shows.”

  The audience apparently disagrees. Mr. Burnett cited an “unbelievable outpouring” of letters and e-mail, mostly about Mr. Letterman’s effort to put words to the nation’s reaction to the World Trade Center tragedy.

  One example, from a captain in the Emergency Medical Service:

  “I know this may sound very corny, but seeing you Monday night made me think that Dave is back and all will be O.K. in time.”

  Woody Allen’s Vision: City As Star

  By LESLIE BENNETTS | March 7, 1986

  WOODY ALLEN’S NEW MOVIE, “HANNAH AND Her Sisters,” opened on Feb. 7 to rave reviews. The film’s cast includes includes Mia Farrow and Michael Caine, but as filmed by Mr. Allen with exquisite care, New York City itself is indisputably one of the movie’s stars.

  To Mr. Allen, who was born and raised in Brooklyn and is a longtime resident of Manhattan, the city seems a beautiful, glamorous place. He is the first to admit that his is a highly selective vision. “I have an affectionate view of it,” he says. “I’ve just always loved it; I’ve only seen it as an extremely exciting, wonderful, romantic place, ever since I was taken here as a child. It’s sort of automatic with me to use it; any time I make a picture in Manhattan, that’s the way I see the city.”

  Not that Mr. Allen himself fails to see the ugliness. “I’m painfully aware of it,” he says. “It depresses me and infuriates me all the time. I probably obsess over it—the constant disintegration of life style in the city.”

  Mr. Allen’s New York is decidedly affluent. “It’s clearly an upscale view of the city,” says Ezra Swerdlow, the film’s production supervisor. One of those people is Miss Farrow, whose own Upper West Side apartment was used as a major interior for the film.

  But whatever the actual sites, all are infused with Mr. Allen’s sense of the excitement of the city. In one scene, the character he plays emerges from a medical examination at Mount Sinai, burdened with the possibility that he may be seriously ill. As he walks down the street, he thinks aloud: “You’re in the middle of New York City. This is your town! You’re surrounded by people and traffic and restaurants. How can you just suddenly one day vanish?”

  In Mr. Allen’s New York, as it turns out, you most joyfully can’t.

  Scene One: A Fire Escape

  By RICK LYMAN | February 13, 1998

  THE STOREFRONT DOOR GROANED OPEN AND A cloud of warm, fleshy air pushed into Elizabeth Street. “Mary, it’s Marty,” Martin Scorsese called to the 94-year-old woman sitting in a chair near the window in an otherwise empty butcher shop. The old meat cutter pushed herself out of her chair, squinted toward the door and squealed with delight. “Ah, Marty! It’s Marty! You’re back!’’

  Little Italy has changed considerably since an afternoon in 1950 when a terrified 8-year-old boy reluctantly transplanted from Corona, Queens, sat on his grandmother’s fire escape and stared down for the first time at the urban cacophony of street kids, winos and wise guys. Many of the Italian-American families have moved out or died off; burgeoning Chinatown has pushed across Canal Street, and there is the usual gentrified ragout of boutiques and bistros amid the boarded-up storefronts.

  But the old neighborhood is still there, if you know where to look and you have the eyes to see it: St. Patrick’s School, where Marty struggled under the merciless ministrations of the Sisters of Mercy; the streets, where he made friends and insinuated himself into the life of the neighborhood; the tenements, where he slept, ate and watched endless hours of old movies on television.

  Mr. Scorsese, 55, lives on the Upper East Side now. His production company is in a suite of midtown offices overlooking Park Avenue. But it was at his grandmother’s apartment, on Elizabeth Street that Marty went out onto the fire escape and looked down with terror into the strange street below.

  “The full force of coming back and looking out the window,” he said. “It was so different, all this life, the noise, the kids running up and down the street, winos falling down. It was just a nightmare. I’ll never forget that image.”

  Spike Lee Tries to Do the Right Thing

  By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN | June 25, 1989

  EVEN BEFORE “DO THE RIGHT THING,” opens, Spike Lee, its producer, director, writer and star, has already got what he expected most from the film: hot debate, heavy discussion and even denunciation from some who think he did the wrong thing.

  “Essentially what I hoped was that it would provoke everybody, white and black,” said the iconoclastic, Brooklyn-born film maker of the movie, which describes how, on the hottest day of the year, the conflicting group allegiances of generally symbiotic neighbors in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant escalate into a tragic killing of a black man by the police and the torching of a white-owned pizza parlor.

  “For many white people, there is a view that black people have the vote and they can live next door to us and it’s all done with and there’s no more racism,” Mr. Lee said during a series of interviews conducted by telephone as he shuttled from Los Angeles to Washington, to Atlanta and Houston, promoting the movie. “As far as I’m concerned, racism is the most pressing problem in the United States; and I wanted the film to bring the issue into the forefront where it belongs.”

  He said that the interviews he has given during the last month have taught him how to take the measure of his interrogators.

  “I can tell exactly how white journalists feel about black people by the questions they ask. ‘Hey, Spike,’ they’ll say, ‘this Bedford-Stuyvesant looks too clean. Hey, Spike, where are the drugs? Where’s the muggers? Hey, I don’t see any teenage women throwing their babies out of windows.’ Those were these people’s perception of black people in general.’’

  He added that magazine cover stories declaring that drugs were a pervasive problem extending through all sectors of American society. “But do those interviewers ask the people who made ‘Rain Man’ or ‘Wall Street’ why they did not include drugs in their pictures?”

  The Streets of Queens Where Rizzuto Played

  By ELLEN BARRY | August 16, 2007

  The Scooter, Phil Rizzuto, at Yankee Stadium, 1995.

  WHEN PHIL RIZZUTO WAS A BOY IN GLENdale, Queens, it was rare to get your hands on an actual baseball. You played with Spaldeens wrapped in string, or flapping old cores patched with adhesive tape, and if the ball rolled into the sewer the boys went down after it.

  Pearl Meyer Suss, who lived on the same block as the Rizzuto family, became closely acquainted with the balls because they kept smashing through her front windows, infuriating her mother. In those days the neighborhood was largely German, and a row of women appeared in front of their houses every Friday to scrub their front stoops by hand.

  Phil did not stand out to her at the time—all the neighborhood boys were baseball-mad—but a few years later the broken windows were something the Meyers could brag about.

  “We felt, ‘Oh, boy, we really knew him,’ ” Mrs. Suss, who is 83, said of the eventual Hall of Fame shortstop for the Yankees.

  Mr. Rizzuto, who died Monday, was mourned with a special twinge in Glendale, the Queens neighborhood where he joined in sandlot games, the kind that used four rocks as bases. Phil was no richer than any of the other kids—his father, Fiore, drove a trolley car on the Myrtle Avenue route—and he was hardly a memorable physical specimen, reaching 5 foot 6 as an adult. It was that quality, his ordinariness, that Sal Calcaterra has been remembering.

  “He played with what he had, that’s for sure,” said Mr. Calcaterra, 65, in the cool of Tee Dee’s Tavern around noon. Asked to recall an anecdote about Mr. Rizzuto, Mr. Calcaterra told a story about a friend of Mr. Rizzuto’s, known as Indian, who was bludgeoned to death with a shuffleboard puck in a bar fight. Then, then he returned to the subject of the shortstop, who, he said, faced down rejection with “the feeling of ‘I’ll show you.’ ”
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br />   Just Another Down-to-Earth Guy

  By IRA BERKOW | February 8, 1995

  THE BOYS AND GIRLS ASSEMBLED AND seated restlessly in the folding chairs at the St. Jude grammar school gymnasium on 204th Street in Manhattan heard their principal make this announcement yesterday afternoon: “We just got a call from our special guest’s limousine driver, and he is on his way here.”

  “Ooh,” came squeals from the kids. He was coming from midtown, where he and six others met the news media as the newest inductees into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

  When Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, St. Jude Class of ’61, swept into the auditorium, natty in blue blazer and charcoal sweater and slacks and tie and shaved head, he was greeted with cheers and applause. He shook hands with the principal, Michael Deegan, and, when he saw his former eighth-grade teacher, now retired, the red-haired, bespectacled Sister Hannah, who came up to just past his elbow, he lowered his 7-foot-2-inch frame and kissed her on the cheek.

  Abdul-Jabbar, who grew up close by, in the Dyckman Housing Projects, had come a long way, and not just yesterday afternoon.

  “It was at St, Jude,” Abdul-Jabbar told the 450 children in the audience, “where I learned values and respect for other people, and learned the importance of an education. I always loved sports—especially baseball when I was a boy, and only began to concentrate on basketball because I had grown too big for baseball. But I remember a priest in the parish here who said I would be too skinny for the N.B.A., and that I had to concentrate on my studies.