The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  In the end, Mr. Wolfe said, what New York is really about is power. “Money alone won’t do,” he said. “The ultimate certification of your status is seeing people jump, and New York is a city set up to see people jump.”

  I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It.

  By COLSON WHITEHEAD | March 2, 2008

  Colson Whitehead received a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as a “genius grant,” in 2002.

  I LIVE IN BROOKLYN. I MOVED HERE 14 years ago for the cheap rent. It was a little embarrassing because I was raised in Manhattan, and so I was a bit of a snob about the other boroughs. At the time there was a big buzz about the “Black Renaissance” of Fort Greene. It was one big house party thrown by Spike Lee and Branford Marsalis, Rosie Perez swinging from the chandelier. Who doesn’t want to be part of a vibrant cultural scene? That didn’t happen, but it was cheap, and I grew to love it.

  “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists, or like writing in Paris, but there aren’t as many people speaking French.

  It’s changed a lot. As you may have heard, all the writers are in Brooklyn these days. It’s the place to be. You’re simply not a writer if you don’t live here. Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? I have a hard time understanding all the hype. I dig it here and all, but it’s just a place. It does not have magical properties.

  In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists, or like writing in Paris, but there aren’t as many people speaking French. What do they expect me to say? “I built my desk out of wooden planks taken from the authentic rubble of Ebbets Field. Have I mentioned how I still haven’t forgiven the Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles?”

  Occasionally you hear the Brooklyn legends that feed the mystique. There was the famous case of the language poet from Red Hook who grew despondent when the Shift key on her MacBook broke. She couldn’t write for weeks. She jumped into the enchanted, glowing waters of the Gowanus Canal. And she was cured! The metaphors came rushing back. With eccentric spacing between the letters, but still. Now you see people jumping off the Union Street Bridge all the time.

  There are demons out there to keep you from working. They have switchblades, bicycle chains and adventuresome tailors. That’s what it’s like to write in Brooklyn.

  I never did meet Spike Lee. He lives in Manhattan now.

  Take the A Train

  TRANSPORTATION

  It’s endlessly chaotic. It’s endlessly confusing. It’s just plain endless: New York City’s transportation system has 722 miles of subway tracks, 13,237 taxis, 12,507 bus stops, 11,871 traffic lights, 2,027 bridges, a dozen or so tunnels, a handful of public and private ferry operators, two major airports (with a third in New Jersey—more about that later), a couple of heliports and one tramway.

  Its size and reach make the city’s transportation system a unique aspect of the New York identity. Other cities have subways—the one in Seoul, South Korea, carries more people every day than New York’s does—and the one in London is considerably older: British sandhogs were digging their tunnels while the Yankees and the Confederates were still fighting the Civil War.

  More than in other places, though, the New York subway defines the city. Where else is it so much a part of a city’s personality that lyrics like “Take the A train” or “The Bronx is up but the Battery’s down, the people ride in a hole in the ground” instantly catch on? Where else could you make a movie like “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” which starred a No. 6 train as itself? Where else would people put up with so many strange sights and smells—the unmistakable alcohol breath of the man in the three-piece suit next to you, the little dog peeking out from the green ski jacket of the man next to him, the woman next to him hurriedly applying her makeup?

  PAGE 58

  That small sampling hints at something important about the subway: It’s decidedly democratic. The billionaire mayor and the welfare mother, seen-it-all oldtimers and wide-eyed newcomers—they all get the same service, for the whole city is one big transit zone. From furthest Bronx to the Battery is about 19 miles. A single fare will take you as far as you want for as long as you want.

  PAGE 60

  The subways have survived everything: breakdowns, fatal accidents, even the deterioration that came when hard times forced cash-strapped transit officials to skimp on maintenance. There’s still no guarantee that you’ll understand what the conductor says on the garble-prone public-address system. But the subways are cleaner nowadays, and safer than in the 1970’s and 1980’s. They are also less stylish than when the system opened in 1904. On opening day, the passen-gers dressed as if they were going to a ball. The women wore evening gowns, the men top hats.

  The subways soon remade New York in the way that Lewis and Clark—and the westward-bound pioneers who followed them—had remade the United States in the preceding century. Old New York was packed into Lower Manhattan. Where the stately New York Public Library now rises above Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street was a reservoir for drinking water until the 1890s. That was the country in those days, far from the center of things, and people had no choice but to live in uncomfortable, unsafe tenements that were within walking distance of where the jobs were. The subways let the city spread out, to everyone’s relief—and the construction industry’s benefit.

  There’s more to transportation in New York than the subways, of course. In the heyday of the railroads, Grand Central Terminal rolled out the red carpet and billed itself as the gateway to a continent. Now it is just another commuter station, the gateway to Pelham and Poughkeepsie—in the name of efficiency, Amtrak switched all its long-distance trains from Grand Central to Pennsylvania Station in 1991.

  When airplanes came along, New York named one of its airports for a mayor who refused to disembark in Newark. When his flight landed there, he bellowed that the ticket said New York and this isn’t New York. There was only one way to get Fiorello H. La Guardia off the plane: the pilot returned to the cockpit and flew twenty-one miles to an airport within the city limits.

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  PAGE 62

  Take that flight now and you’ll cruise over a jumble of taxis, buses, trucks, limousines and cars with gotta-get-there drivers pounding their dashboards. This is traffic so jammed that somebody invented a word to describe stop-and-go driving at its worst: gridlock. Crossing the city’s bridges in bumper-to-bumper formation, most drivers never take a close look at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (the nation’s longest suspension span) or the George Washington Bridge (whose two levels are nicknamed George and Martha). The cables can withstand a pull of several hundred million pounds, and at night they glimmer like necklaces.

  On the sidewalks, pedestrians search out the shortest, fastest route from here to there. Reporters call it news when they can walk across town faster than the crosstown bus. In other cities, people call the ones who cross in the middle of the block—or when the light is red—jaywalkers. In New York, they call them New Yorkers.

  TROLLEYS AND RAIL STATIONS

  The Disappearing Trolley Car Still Rings a Bell in Their Hearts

  By MCCANDLISH PHILLIPS | September 4, 1957

  Everett A. White at the controls one of the trolley cars at the Trolley Museum of New York.

  THERE IS A SORT OF TWILIGHT ZONE IN THE history of things when they are yet too young for cherished memory and too old for use. It is there that the trolley car dwells today, a thing of the too recent past.

  A generation ago, 3,000 cars rasped and grated over Brooklyn. Now there is one line left, and that without passengers.

  But if trolley cars are gone, trolley fans remain. Chief among them is Everett A. White, curator of the Trolley Museum of New York and a man who needs no lectures on the fragility of human institutions. Mr. White and 60 men of stern resolve have appoint
ed themselves interim custodians of the trolley car.

  There is something about the trolley that suggests the providential defiance of a principle of locomotion. The Toonerville Trolley may have been a caricature, but it drew abundantly on fact. Most old trolleys looked a bit improbable. Inside, where the motorman stood, there was a magnificent jumble of gears and gauges and handles and boxes and pipes and pedals and wheels. They may have been the work of mad genius, but they worked.

  Mr. White and his friends have spent $2,400 to snatch four old cars from the death fingers of the scrap dealers. The museum sells about 60 $2-a-year passes that give the buyers the right to come down and work on the cars whenever they care to. Ten or fifteen years from now, he thinks, people will see trolley cars for the things of beauty they really were.

  Midair Rescue Lifts Passengers From Stranded East River Tram

  By JENNIFER 8. LEE | April 19, 2006

  A four-minute trip on the Roosevelt Island Tramway turned into a harrowing ordeal that lasted hours as a series of power failures left about 70 people suspended hundreds of feet in the air, forcing a daring late-night rescue over the East River.

  About 11 p.m., after the passengers on two tram cars, one headed in each direction, had been hanging for more than six hours, rescuers began moving the people in the Roosevelt Island-bound one. Passengers were pulled from the side door and loaded into an orange wire gondola. By midnight, 22 of the approximately 50 people in the Roosevelt Island-bound tram had been rescued in two trips, including 12 children and an elderly woman who was using a walker.

  Cheers erupted when the first group, with eight children and five adults, touched ground at the Roosevelt Island terminal about 11:30 p.m. The children exchanged high-fives with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. They were greeted with juice, cookies and, for several Hasidic Jews in the first group, matzo.

  Rescuers were still debating whether to use a crane with a basket to rescue the remaining passengers. If not, they planned to use the gondola, which had crawled the 3,100-foot-long stretch of cable with self-generated diesel power.

  “We want to get out of this with nobody injured,” the mayor said, “and hopefully we learned something about how this will not happen again.”

  The ordeal began shortly before 5 p.m. when the power went out, leaving the two tram cars motionless on cables that rise as high as 250 feet above the East River between the East Side of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island.

  Officials said the diesel generator that powers the system failed, and then the backup generator stopped working as well. Efforts to crank the cars manually also proved fruitless.

  It was the second time the tram had stalled for hours in the past eight months, raising questions about the aging system, which went into service in 1976. “They have new cabs, new windows, new cables,” said Judith A. Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, “but it’s old equipment.”

  Aerial Tram To Roosevelt Island Opens With a Splash—on O’Dwyer

  By FRED FERRETTI | May 18, 1976

  AERIAL TRAMWAY SERVICE CONNECTING Manhattan with the city’s newest urban community on Roosevelt Island was formally inaugurated with champagne and public expressions of hope for the city’s future.

  But, as usually happens with historic occurrences here, the ceremonies quickly became informal and a backdrop for a series of those awkward municipal embarrassments so dear to the hearts of New Yorkers.

  The opening of the 3,100-foot connection between the East Side and the city’s still-abuilding “New Town” in the East River was marked by Mayor Beame, who welcomed the first skyriders to “Roosevelt Avenue,” and then smashed a bottle of New York State champagne against one of the two trams, drenching City Council President Paul O’Dwyer, lapel to knee.

  The mayor called it “a streetcar in the sky,” and said it was one of the city’s major achievements of the year—the others being Operation Sail and the July 4 planned festival, the continuing bicentennial observances and the Democratic National Convention.

  Then it was time for the official christening. Mr. Beame swung the bottle, and it burst with a great splash gushing over Mr. O’Dwyer.

  The City Council president, a politician with as much aplomb as anyone in the business, reached to his suit front, drew his finger across the wetness, put it into his mouth with a sipping sound, then said, “Finger Lakes District. Definitely. And dry.”

  New Terminal the Heart Of City’s Transit System

  February 2, 1913

  Plans to build a tower directly over Grand Central Terminal, shown here in the late 1970’s, were stopped 1975.

  GRAND CENTRAL STATION AS THE MAIN entrance to New York City is naturally a most important point in the local rapid transit system. The present Interborough Subway was laid out to pass its doors, and the new Lexington Avenue Subway will come down its eastern side. These lines were designed to reach the Grand Central Station because of its existence, but to them must be added the very important Steinway Tunnel line, which will run across Times Square and was built from the end of 42nd Street.

  So it will happen that, wonderful as is the new Grand Central Station, from the engineering point of view, the complex of subways just outside of it will be equally worthy of attention. The solid rock on which this part of Manhattan is built will in the next three or four years be absolutely honeycombed with rapid transit lines, and the ingenuity of the engineers will be taxed to the uttermost.

  A Glittery Destination As Refurbished Grand Central Terminal Reopens

  By SUSAN SACHS | October 2, 1998

  ONCE THREATENED WITH DEMOLITION, gnawed by decades of urban grime, obscured by ungainly advertising signs, corroded by roof leaks and just plain unloved by the 500,000 people who sprint through its cavernous halls each day on the way to somewhere else, Grand Central Terminal celebrated its rebirth as a lustrous train station that ranks as a destination in its own right.

  With sunlight pouring through steel- ribbed skylights and twin marble staircases curling to a platform on the east side of the main concourse, the 85-year-old structure is once again so imposing that it dwarfed those who came to praise it during a spirited rededication ceremony.

  “The ‘grand’ has truly been put back into the Grand Central Terminal,” declared E. Virgil Conway, chairman of the Metro- politan Transportation Authority, his voice so distorted by the echoing marble walls that it was indistinguishable from those simultaneously announcing track numbers for the next trains to Connecticut.

  Grand Central’s grandeur faded in the 1950s as rail travel declined. Its once pristine interior halls were rented out for billboards, and by 1968, developers were talking about surrounding the terminal with high-rise buildings and demolishing the main concourse. It was saved, after a 10-year court battle, with the help of preservationists who enlisted the high- profile help of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

  Cleansing “Triumphant Portal” Ceiling

  By JAMES BARRON | February 3, 1996

  The Main Concourse after the completion of a $197 million renovation project. The cleaned ceiling reveals the 2,500 stars that had been completely obscured by decades of grime.

  THE KEEPERS OF GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL are betting that what was good enough for the Sistine Chapel will be good enough for the 83-year-old train station. Like the Michelangelo fresco at the Vatican, the vaulted sky ceiling over the main concourse in Grand Central is about to get a soap-and-water scrubbing.

  The cleansing of the star constellations and zodiac signs, which over the years have gone from glittering gold on bright blue to algae green under a thick coat of grime, is intended to restore the splendor of the Beaux-Arts terminal that opened in 1913 as “a triumphant portal to New York,” in the proud but immodest characterization of its architect, Whitney Warren.

  Grand Central quickly became a leak-stained, mildewed portal. In the 1940’s, its owner, the New York Central Railroad, replaced the original plaster ceiling, not by touching up the paint but by bolting and gluing on a whole new t
ableau made of 4-by-8-foot panels. A similar but less ornate constellation was then painted on.

  Over the last few years some art historians have maintained that the 1940’s panels should be removed and the more detailed 1913 ceiling restored. But the New York Central’s successor, the Metro-North Commuter Railroad, ultimately decided to restore the 1940’s ceiling.

  “We spent an infinite amount of time investigating what would work,” said Susan Fine, Metro-North’s director of real estate and the executive in charge of the restoration. “What we needed to find was an extremely gentle way of getting the dirt off without contaminating, discoloring or burnishing the existing ceiling.”

  In other words, no abrasiveness, no bleach and no residue. She and the architect overseeing the restoration, James W. Rhodes, settled on a nontoxic product called Simple Green.

  New Station Open for Business

  November 27, 1910

  Penn Station at rush hour in 1944. Its demolition in 1963 led to the creation of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

  THE PENNSYLVANIA STATION IN SEVENTH Avenue, between 32nd and 33rd Streets, opened to passengers between New York and points south, west, and southwest at 9:30 o’clock last night. A throng of some 2,000 persons was on hand when the big doors leading to the main station, from the Seventh Avenue side, swung open.