The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  “You train so much, you don’t have to think about it.”

  Muscle memory had steadied people in the currents of a disaster and the strong tides of the Hudson: an airline pilot remembering his metal clipboard, and ferry pilots who never moved out of reach of the bobbing airplane.

  “You train so much, you don’t have to think about it,” Captain Lucas said. “I didn’t have to give any orders to the crew.”

  And by Friday, another kind of memory began to take hold.

  “We were getting the boat ready, and we saw the plane going down,” said Captain Liba, 52, who pilots the ferry Moira Smith. “We called management, we said, ‘We got to go.’ We just took off for the airplane. Right away, the doors flew out from the plane, and people came out.

  “It’s like a dream. I still can’t believe it.”

  Crane Collapses on the East Side, Leaving Four Dead

  By ROBERT D. MCFADDEN | March 16, 2008

  A crane toppled and collapsed onto a high-rise apartment building on March 15, 2008.

  A CRANE TOWERING OVER A HIGH-RISE construction site on the East Side of Manhattan collapsed in a roar of rending steel, raining death and destruction across a city block as it slashed down on an apartment building, broke into sections, crushed a town house and cut away a tenement facade.

  At least four people were killed and more than a dozen others were injured, and damage was expected to run into the millions of dollars in what the authorities called one of the city’s worst accidents—a calamity that turned a neighborhood near the United Nations into a zone of panic, pulverized buildings, wailing sirens, evacuations, searches in the rubble and covered bodies in the streets.

  Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg arrived at the scene surrounded by an army of police officers, firefighters, city officials and reporters. “It’s a sad day,” he said, as the lights of scores of emergency vehicles revolved and flashed.

  As people were evacuated from a half-dozen buildings and rescue workers using dogs, listening devices and thermal imaging cameras searched the rubble for victims—taking care to cause no further collapses—the mayor said the four known dead were believed to be construction workers on or near the crane. The injured included at least three civilians taken to hospitals in critical condition.

  The cause of the accident on a sunny, windless day was unclear and under investigation by city, state and federal agencies. But Stephen Kaplan, an owner of the Reliance Construction Group working at the site, told The Associated Press that a piece of steel had fallen and sheared off one of the girders holding the crane to the building.

  A construction worker on the 15th floor, Ismael Garcia, said he saw something fall and strike one or more of the girder ties, weakening or breaking the connections. “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a piece falling,” he said, and then the crane pulled away.

  Witnesses told of a rising, thundering roar and clouds of smoke and dust as the crane—a vertical latticed boom for its base, topped by a cab and jib, the swinging arm that lifts building materials—fell across 51st Street and onto a 19-story apartment building at No. 300, demolishing a penthouse and shaking the building with the force of an earthquake.

  Mike Shatzkin, a resident of the 17th floor, said he was talking on the phone when it hit. “All of a sudden, I felt a very violent shake, and stuff fell off the walls, and my wife said a bomb went off.” After discovering that their building had been struck by the crane from across the street, he said, “We worried about this crane every day.”

  New Miracles For Window Cleaner Who Fell 47 Floors

  By JAMES BARRON | January 4, 2008

  ALCIDES MORENO PLUNGED 47 STORIES THAT morning last month, clinging to his 3-foot-wide window washer’s platform as it shot down the dark glass face of an Upper East Side apartment building. His brother Edgar, who had been working with him on the platform, was killed.

  Somehow, Alcides Moreno survived.

  He was given roughly 24 pints of blood and 19 pints of plasma and underwent an operation to open his abdomen in the emergency room because, his doctor said, they did not want to risk moving him to an operating room. As December went on, he endured nine orthopedic operations.

  Yet somehow, Alcides Moreno, the man who fell from the sky, survived.

  In his hospital room, amid all the machines that helped keep him alive, his wife, Rosario, lifted his hand again and again to stroke her face and her hair, hoping against hope that a simple tactile sensation would remind him, would help bring him back.

  Then on Christmas Day, Alcides Moreno reached out—and stroked the wrong face.

  “Apparently he tried to do it to one of the nurses,” Rosario Moreno said, describing how she chided him, gently, when she was told what had happened. “I looked at him and said, ‘You’re not supposed to do that. I’m your wife, you touch your wife.’”

  For the first time since the accident on Dec. 7, he spoke. “He turned around and, in English, said, ‘What did I do?’” she said. “It stunned me because I didn’t know he could speak.”

  Surrounded by doctors who had helped save her husband, Mrs. Moreno told her story at a press conference at which medical professionals with long years of experience in treating traumatic injuries used words like “miraculous” and “unprecedented” to describe something that seems remarkable: a man who fell nearly 500 feet into a Manhattan alleyway is now talking and, with a little more luck, a few more operations and some rehabilitation therapy, may well walk again.

  “If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one,” said Dr. Philip S. Barie, the chief of the division of critical care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, where Mr. Moreno, 37, is being treated.

  “We are very pleased—dare I say astonished?—at the level of recovery that this patient has enjoyed so far,” he added, “and although there is more work to be done, we are very optimistic for his prospects for survival.”

  “This is right up there with those anecdotes of people falling out of airplanes and surviving, people whose parachutes don’t open and somehow they manage to survive.”

  The doctors predicted that his recovery would be complete in about a year. Asked at the press conference whether Mr. Moreno would walk again, Dr. Barie said, “We believe so, yes.” He noted that Mr. Moreno’s pelvis had not been injured in the fall. Dr. Barie also said that all the injuries to Mr. Moreno’s legs—some 10 fractures—had been “repaired” except one.

  “This is right up there with those anecdotes of people falling out of airplanes and surviving, people whose parachutes don’t open and somehow they manage to survive,” Dr. Barie said in an interview after the press conference. “We’re talking about tiny, tiny percentages, well under 1 percent, of people who fall that distance and survive.”

  A Bite of the Big Apple

  FOOD

  In New York, there are people who don’t just eat to live, they live to eat. Fortunately for them, the city probably deserves the title of world restaurant capital on the basis of numbers alone, although quality and variety have soared too. New York has more than 20,000 restaurants. You could dine out every day for 55 years and never order from the same menu twice.

  That total takes in the handful of four-star restaurants presided over by the world-famous chefs, the checkered-tablecloth bistros where you can have a casual supper with friends, the stylish Manhattan sushi bars and the more authentic outer-borough ethnic places, the lunch-counter diners that serve eggs any style (and just about anything else) at any hour. Even the chain coffee shops count as restaurants—and are required by the city health department to post calorie counts showing how fattening that grande nonfat latte really is. And of course there are the places and people you read about in the gossip columns: the hotel dining room where V.I.P.’s have their see-and-be-seen power breakfasts, the Midtown restaurants where that former Secretary of State is at this table, that television personality is at that table and that best-selling author is across the room.

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  The tab? It’s not always a budget-breaker. Back in 1992, the city’s convention and visitors bureau organized a weeklong promotion that featured three-course meals for $19.92. Restaurant week has continued with a tiny allowance for inflation. That pushed the price to $19.93 the following year, then $19.94 and $19.95 and so on. By 2009, restaurant week stretched to nearly a month as desperate maitres d’hotel worried about filling tables suddenly emptied by a plunging economy—and not just on Wall Street. For once, Manhattan’s infamously snooty reservations-takers dialed down the attitude.

  Sheer numbers aren’t the only reason to count New York as the restaurant capital, though: New York has had a front-row banquette for some of the greatest culinary developments of the last 30 years. The “food revolution” that began in the mid-1970’s remade the way New Yorkers eat, the way they think about food and, when they go the do-it-yourself route, the way they cook. Now they hunt for fresh vegetables and herbs, not frozen or dried ones; for sea salt that explodes in your mouth, not the processed, iodized kind; for almost-fat-free hamburgers that taste like more like filet mignon than ground chuck.

  They don’t have to go far to find much better ingredients than were available a generation ago. More than 40 Greenmarkets like the one in Union Square bring produce to the city soon after it is harvested. Providing profitable places for local farmers to sell homegrown fruits and vegetables has a back-to-the-future ring: For much of the nineteenth century, Brooklyn was the nation’s number one top-producing agricultural area. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, when suburban supermarkets trucked in delicious-looking produce from the West Coast, New Yorkers complained that the produce in their markets was past its prime: brown lettuce, overripe avocadoes and rotten tomatoes. Good produce was not far away: the farms that supply the greenmarkets (and some of the corner vegetable-and-flower markets that also sprang up in Manhattan) are in upstate New York and rural New Jersey. As specialty markets caught on, the mantra among homemakers who worshipped fine food was that it was more important to know where to shop than it was how to cook. That changed, of course, with Julia Child on public television and her successors on cable.

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  But the food revolution also made dining out less of a special occasion. That turned the restaurant business into a growth industry that helped remake whole neighborhoods as they went through “gentrification.” Restaurants led the way in making destinations of SoHo and TriBeCa and—ironically—the meatpacking district on Manhattan’s far west side, where the chefs set up shop across the street or down the block from where real meat-packers still unload beef carcasses and trundle them into refrigerated cutting rooms.

  Soon, restaurants became a new kind of theater, with celebrity chefs who performed in glass-walled “open” kitchens where their every move was as closely watched as Baryshnikov’s. Tableside audiences thrilled to the twist of this and the dash of that that made all the difference—and sometimes the temper tantrums that made the papers. The chefs found their inspiration in cross-cultural “fusion” recipes and other innovations that turned top chefs into best-selling authors and international entrepreneurs.

  Restaurant reviews became as closely read as opening-night drama reviews. Excerpted here are a handful, including Ruth Reichl’s famous description of her schizoid experience at Le Cirque, first as an ordinary customer relegated to a back table where the service was ho-hum, then as a restaurant critic welcomed with the truffles-and-flourishes treatment.

  So the food’s the thing, and New York foodies love those only-in-New-York specialties. A bagel anywhere else (or a piece of cheesecake or a slice of pizza or a pickle) is still a bagel (or a piece of cheesecake or—well, you get the idea). But it’s just not the same.

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  PIZZA, CHEESECAKE AND BAGELS

  Pizza Now Rivals the Hot Dog In Popularity

  By HERBERT MITGANG | February 12, 1956

  PIZZA MAY NEVER REPLACE HOT DOGS AS THE great American “bite,” but their amazing acceptance in recent years prompts a question: Why pizza and not, say, Mexican enchiladas? The entertainment weekly Variety reported that the “extent to which the pizza pies are replacing hot dogs at drive-ins was demonstrated at the concession trade show at Allied States Ass’n convention which featured more pizza-making machines than frankfurter heaters.”

  But a Neapolitan pizzaiuolo might be startled by pizza in the United States. There is a dainty appetizer prefabricated in the food chains going under a name that sounds like little bo-pizza. At a “pizza bar” in a large Manhattan department store—where thousands are absorbed weekly by hungry shoppers—three kinds are for sale: plain pizza (a pie); pizzaret (a muffin); and a best-seller called the pizza-bagel, created, after some protest, by a turncoat pizzaiuolo from Florida.

  The search for a down-to-hearth pizza is a constant game for cavaliers of authentic cooking. Gennaro Lombardi seemed to be the man to turn to. Nobody has disputed his claim to having the oldest pizzeria in the United States.

  “I’ll make you a pizza myself just like Dad used to make in the old days,” said one of Lombardi’s boys, George, 40. “Dad’ll be here later—he takes it a little easier now. He broke me in.”

  Young Lombardi took a piece of dough from the refrigerator. “I made the dough myself this morning,” he said. “A little flour, water, salt, yeast and the secret.” (Every pizzeria worthy of the name has one top secret.) “Notice I don’t have to toss it in the air,” he continued, flattening the dough on a marble table. “The show doesn’t make the pizza. I spread it evenly so that it comes out a quarter of an inch thick. Less than that burns the bottom; more, it doesn’t get crisp.

  “Then I spread these big chunks of Italian mozzarella cheese over the dough. Some places sprinkle little bitsy pieces or even use American cheese. The mozzarella before the tomatoes—it melts right that way. Then the real Italian olive oil.” No Sicilian oregano? George frowned: “That’s what they serve uptown.”

  You Can Call It Ray’s, but Expect A Lawsuit to Go

  By WILLIAM E. GEIST | May 2, 1987

  “HELLO, RAY’S PIZZA,” SAID THE WOMAN answering the telephone.

  “May I please speak to Ray?” she was asked.

  “Ray?” she replied. “Oh, Ray. Ray cannot come to the phone… . You know, there is no Ray, really… . Nobody is Ray.”

  It had been hoped that talking to Ray himself might straighten out the Ray’s pizza imbroglio.

  Rosolino Mangano has decided to do something about it himself. Mr. Mangano, who opened his first Original Ray’s Pizza at 1073 First Avenue—and went on to open nine additional Original Ray’s—said that he has filed a lawsuit to enjoin all the other Ray’s pizza parlors in Manhattan from using the good name of Ray.

  This would apparently include, but would not be limited to: Ray’s Pizza, Original Ray’s, Ray’s Original, Famous Ray’s, Ray’s Famous, Famous and Original Ray’s, the One and Only Famous Ray’s, Real Ray’s and so on.

  “It is unbelievably confusing,” said Nelson Birgene, having a pepperoni and mushroom slice yesterday at the Ray’s on Seventh Avenue at 53d Street. “This one is called ‘Famous’ and ‘Original Ray’s,’ so I figured I was covered.”

  Most of the Ray’s—and those in the business say there are dozens—are unrelated, yet have certain characteristics in common. Virtually all claim to be the first Ray’s. And none seems to have a real Ray.

  Why Ray? Why not Guido’s or Benito’s or Giuseppe’s famous and original pizza? “Ray is a nice name,” said Mr. Bari. “If our restaurant was named Michelle’s, the whole city would be full of Michelle’s pizza.”

  New York Pizza, the Real Thing, Makes a Comeback

  By ERIC ASIMOV | June 10, 1998

  NEW YORK PIZZA IS A PHRASE SYNONYMOUS with pizza greatness, yet for years New Yorkers could find the genuine article in only a few isolated spots. Now pizza lovers can rejoice: the true New York pizza is back in town.

  As recently as 10 years ago, the classic pizza was
on the endangered list, treasured as an artifact of old New York but bypassed by a culture that preferred its pizzas fast, cheap and delivered. Just a few pizza landmarks, most famously John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street, Patsy’s Pizza in East Harlem and Totonno’s Pizzeria Napolitano in Coney Island—all presided over by rival clans—zealously preserved the traditions. Disciples were required to make pilgrimages to these hallowed halls for a taste.

  Today, those three families, plus a newcomer, are almost entirely responsible for a pizza renaissance in New York. The landmarks have been joined by a new set of great names: Grimaldi’s under the Brooklyn Bridge; Lombardi’s on Spring Street; Nick’s in Forest Hills, Queens, and Rockville Centre, on Long Island; Candido on the Upper East Side; Polistina’s on the Upper West Side; Zito’s in the East Village and, most recently, Angelo’s on West 57th Street.

  The legendary pizza makers—John Sasso of John’s, Patsy Lancieri of Patsy’s and Anthony (Totonno) Pero of Totonno’s—are all said to have learned their craft at Gennaro Lombardi’s brick-walled coal oven in Little Italy. Nearly a century later, their descendants, including Lombardi’s grandson, are fueling the expansion. New York’s pizza dynasties are now in their third and fourth generations, and counting.

  Yet a lot of the energy has come from new blood, the Angelis-Tsoulos clan, which joined the pizza pantheon just a few years ago. In 1994, Nick Angelis, the son of a Greek pizza maker who learned the art in Naples, opened Nick’s Pizza in Forest Hills. It is dedicated to preserving the tradition of New York’s great pie men. Paradoxically, he uses a new kind of gas oven that can achieve the high heat necessary for the best pies. No matter. It’s hard to imagine a better crust than Nick’s: blackened and barely crisp, glistening and golden, with a faintly smoky flavor. The crust is matched by the other ingredients: pure, creamy mozzarella, delicious roasted peppers, terrific sausage.