The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  They paid receipts estimated at between $900,000 and $1,000,000 to see whether Schmeling could repeat the knockout he administered to Louis just two years ago, or whether the Bomber could avenge this defeat as he promised.

  Thrilling to the spectacle of this short, savage victory which held so much significance were a member of President Roosevelt’s Cabinet, Postmaster General James A Farley; several governors, mayors, Representatives and Senators; judges and lawyers; doctors; stars of the stage and screen; and ring champions of the past and present—all assembled eagerly.

  As far as the length of the battle was concerned, the investment in seats, which ran to $30 each, was a poor one. But for excitement, for drama, for pulse-throbs, those who came from near and far felt themselves well repaid because they saw a fight that was surpassed by few for thrills.

  On the third knockdown Schmeling’s trainer and closest friend, Max Machon, hurled a towel into the ring, admitting defeat for his man.

  The signal is ignored in American boxing, and Referee Arthur Donovan, before he had a chance to pick up the count in unison with knockdown timekeeper Eddie Josephs, who was outside the ring, gathered the white emblem in a ball and hurled it through the ropes.

  Returning to Schmeling’s crumpled figure, Donovan took one look and signaled an end of the battle. Donovan could have counted off a century and Max could not have regained his feet.

  Louis, in the records, will be deprived of a clean-cut knockout. It will appear as a technical knockout because Referee Donovan didn’t complete the full 10-second count over Schmeling. But this is merely a technicality. No fighter ever was more thoroughly knocked out than was Max.

  The Bell Tolls 10 Times for the Ring At Madison Square Garden

  By FRANK LITSKY | September 20, 2007

  FIGHTERS RETIRE. TRAINERS AND MANAGERS retire. But a boxing ring?

  In a ceremony in Madison Square Garden’s lobby, the Garden retired its 82-year-old ring. It is headed for the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota in upstate New York, and a new and slightly larger ring will replace it.

  “The ring is dead. Long live the ring.”

  The ring made its debut in 1925 for a light-heavyweight title fight in which Paul Berlenbach outpointed Jack Delaney, a French-Canadian born Ovila Chapdelaine, whose last name, to American ears, sounded like Jack Delaney.

  It was used for title fights at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. In promotional stunts, it was set up for exhibition bouts in Times Square, on 125th Street and in front of the Nathan’s hot dog stand in Coney Island. Joe Frazier—who defeated Muhammad Ali in the so-called Fight of the Century at the Garden in 1971—said he also boxed (but not hard) with his son Marvis in that ring once when it was set up on a street in Little Italy.

  “It was the best ring ever built,” said Bobby Goodman, who promoted Garden fights for almost 10 years, “and we took care of it. We shined the posts, which were solid brass, and the television people yelled because there was too much glare.”

  The ceremony attracted a Who’s Who of boxing greats and world champions: Joe Frazier, Emile Griffith, Bernard Hopkins, Buddy McGirt, Carlos Ortiz, and a score of others.

  McGirt, 43, fought 25 times at the Garden (Tony Canzoneri holds the record of 29).

  “That ring was the foundation of my career,” McGirt said. “Most of my fights were here. The first time you’re coming through that tunnel, knowing you’re here in this arena with its history, you can’t describe it. And I had to love it because I never got knocked out in it.”

  The only part of the old ring that will remain is the brass bell. Everything else will be gone. As the promoter Don King said: “The ring is dead. Long live the ring.”

  MARATHONS

  Fireman Wins First Marathon

  By AL HARVIN | September 14, 1970

  GARY MUHRCKE, A 30-YEAR-OLD FIREMAN running for the Millrose Athletic Association, finished nearly a half-mile ahead of his nearest competition as he won the first New York City Marathon in 2 hours 31 minutes 38.2 seconds.

  Finishing second over the 26-mile, 385-yard course laid out on the roadway of the park, which is closed to auto traffic but open to cyclists on Sunday, was Tom Fleming, a student at Paterson State College in New Jersey. His time was 2:35:34.

  Of 126 runners who started in front of the Tavern on the Green at 11 a.m., 55 finished. The first 10 received wristwatches, the next 35 clocks and everybody who competed got commemorative trophies.

  In addition Muhrcke, from Freeport, L.I., who finished 10th in the Boston Marathon three years ago, received a big trophy with a Miss Liberty atop holding a torch.

  The lone woman in the race—unofficially—was Mrs. Nina Kuscsik. She went home empty-handed, having dropped out after the third circuit, covering 14.2 miles in 1:39. Her husband, Richard, did not finish either.

  “I wanted to finish very badly,” said Mrs. Kuscsik, who completed the Boston Marathon in 3:11 unofficially earlier this year. “But I had a virus earlier this week and I just couldn’t. I can’t accept any awards and, by dropping out, I avoided any problems with the A.A.U. [Amateur Athletic Union].”

  Moses Mayfield of Philadelphia, running unattached, led on every lap, but started to feel dizzy on the last. He fell behind and finished eighth in 2:49:50.

  “This is a nice, easy course,” said Mayfield, who finished 23rd in the Boston Marathon. “I don’t know why I got dizzy. I’m in very good shape. I’m going to a doctor to check it out.”

  “I knew Moses was going to fade,” said Muhrcke. “He always starts fast. I passed him around 90th Street with about three miles to go.”

  A Marathon Turns Into a Sprint; Kenyan Wins It By Just a Step

  By JERÉ LONGMAN | November 7, 2005

  AFTER RUNNING 26 MILES WITHOUT DECIDing yesterday’s New York City Marathon, Paul Tergat of Kenya and Hendrick Ramaala of South Africa began a grimly beautiful sprint to the finish.

  With grand desperation, the two men ran shoulder to shoulder for the final 385 yards in Central Park. Tergat, the elegant world-record holder, clenched his teeth in frantic determination, while Ramaala, the defending champion, opened his mouth wide as if to shout or to gulp for oxygen to fuel his tired legs.

  Tergat drew ahead, then Ramaala, two exhausted men running at top speed, or whatever speed they could summon after more than two hours in the heat and humidity on a course made rugged by hills and bridges. Even with 25 yards left, there was no clear winner, only a great struggle between two men who would deliver the closest race in this marathon’s 36-year history.

  “It’s not nice,” Ramaala, 33, said later of the pained stretch run. “You don’t enjoy it.”

  On and on they ran, one man unable to separate himself from the other. In the final yards, Ramaala gave a hopeful lunge, leaning for the tape more like a sprinter than a marathoner, but he had begun to stagger, and in that last moment, after all those miles, Tergat crossed the line first in 2 hours 9 minutes 30 seconds. A stride behind, Ramaala reached the finish officially one second later and collapsed to the pavement in heartbreakingly narrow defeat.

  “I know the feeling,” Tergat, 36, said, having lost the 10,000 meters at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, by nine-hundredths of a second, caught at the tape by Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia. Afterward Tergat consoled Ramaala against despondency, telling him: “Take it easy. This is sport.”

  The victory would prove as redemptive as it was exhilarating for Tergat. Although he holds the marathon world record of 2:04:55, set in Berlin in 2003, he has known a career of aching defeat. Twice he finished second on the track to Gebrselassie at the Olympics and three times he had to settle for the runner-up spot at marathons in London and Chicago.

  Tergat’s exact clocking was 2:09:29.90; Ramaala’s exact time was 2:09:30.22. Meb Keflezighi of the United States took third in 2:09:56. Another naturalized American, Abdihakim Abdirahman, took fifth in 2:11:24. It was the first time since 1993 that two Americans finished among the top five men in New York
.

  Race Becomes More Than An Annual Event

  By GLORIA RODRIGUEZ | November 3, 2003

  THOSE WHO LIVE BY BEDFORD AVENUE AND South Fourth Street in Brooklyn had their 11th-mile welcoming all set for the New York City Marathon runners yesterday. Salsa music blasting from a top-floor window filled the street, volunteers lined up to hand out water and spectators held up signs for the runners.

  “Victoria, the runners,” Maria Molina told her 5-year-old daughter, who sat in a small lawn chair, as the first female runners passed.

  For Molina and others who live nearby, the marathon is more than an annual event. It has become a neighborhood tradition. Several of her family members gather every year to hand out water and cheer on the runners. Molina’s mother makes chicken soup and hot chocolate for the neighbors, and they play the salsa music from Molina’s home.

  “It is something we grew up with,” Molina said. “It is something we do every year. It is part of our neighborhood.”

  Melissa Gonzalez, 20, has been volunteering at the water stations on Bedford Avenue since she was 7. Gonzalez’s grandmother, who died two years ago, first signed her up as a volunteer. Gonzalez said the marathon played a big role in the neighborhood.

  “It is something we do every year. It is part of our neighborhood.”

  “You see more and more people coming out to help,” she said.

  Mayra Laro tried to give the runners strength with oranges. For the third year, Laro offered the runners sections of oranges from the sidewalk. She stood with her 2-year-old daughter and her 5- and 11-year-old sons by South Sixth Street. She woke up early yesterday to cut 75 oranges.

  “I like to help them and I want my children to continue the tradition,” she said in Spanish. “Maybe in the future they can run in it, too.”

  All Around the Town

  NEIGHBORHOODS

  Enough generalizing about how New York is big, which it is. Or crowded. It’s that too. Or noisy. Or impersonal, which it can be. New York’s identity really comes from its neighborhoods, each a city-within-the-city, each distinctly different from the one a few blocks away, each with its own particularly character, tempo and history.

  You’d never mistake Manhattan’s Upper East Side, with its arrow-straight avenues and expensive apartment houses, for, say, Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, a low-rise world of Victorian homes and small storefronts. You’d know you were in Astoria, Queens, and not Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, because you’d hear Greek on the streets of one and Russian on the streets of the other.

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  Over time, some neighborhoods disappeared: the parts and repair shops of Manhattan’s Electronics Row were demolished in the 1960s to make way for the World Trade Center. Some neighborhoods were redefined by highways that sliced through after the houses in their path had been condemned and torn down. Some neighborhoods emerged and took on a new personality when they were suddenly exposed: the removal of Manhattan’s elevated railways in the 1940s and 1950s let the sun shine in on Third Avenue, on Sixth Avenue (later renamed the Avenue of the Americas but still called Sixth Avenue by nearly everyone) and on Ninth Avenue.

  Some neighborhoods were made to order: Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan was laid out according to a 1960s blueprint for a “comprehensive community.” So was Riverside South, the development in the West 60s and West 70s that replaced an abandoned railroad yard. You may not like the tallish, boxy buildings that Donald J. Trump and his partners built there, but they define a neighborhood—even if it remains emotionally distinct from the rest of the Upper West Side.

  Most neighborhoods are not like that: they are a hodgepodge of the old and new. In the 1990s, Woody Allen and his neighbors on the Upper East Side fought plans for an apartment tower, claiming that a structure so tall and modern should not be squeezed between their low-rise townhouses and 1920s apartment buildings. The city agencies eventually approved a compromise plan for a somewhat shorter tower—but even now, some cannot walk along Madison Avenue without complaining that it blocks the sky.

  All this is evidence of one constant in the life of every neighborhood: the internal change that is a sign of a large, living city that often seems to be at war with itself. That has been a characteristic of New York since the days when most of Manhattan was farmland. Rundown neighborhoods get gentrified—that’s one way of putting it. Another way is to say that dilapidated buildings get renovated, but only after longtime tenants have been thrown out. And they cannot afford the post-make-over prices. So the old residential neighborhoods become peopled by other people. Go away for a couple of years, and stores that once had mainly Jewish or Italian customers now cater to Muslims.

  Old boundaries blur: Chinatown spilled into Little Italy and has now all but taken it over. What was Williamsbridge in the Bronx has become Wakefield. And don’t confuse Williamsbridge with Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood where former factories became lofts for artists. The hipsters call it Billburg.

  People now live, shop and dine expensively in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, once a no-man’s-land of grimy warehouses and butcher shops. Converted factories in Queens and Brooklyn have been remade as apartment houses—a sign of the economic tide that swept inland from the Hudson River and the East River, eliminating more than 16,000 longshoremen’s jobs in the mid-1950s.

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  New neighborhoods have invented new names for themselves, funny-sounding acronyms: SoHo, NoHo, Nolita and Dumbo—for South of Houston and, obviously, North of Houston; North of Little Italy; and, in Brooklyn, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Those and other neighborhoods become fashionable after being ignored for years—Chelsea, for example. It went from rundown to chic in the 1980s and, starting in the 1990s, added “high culture” to the upscale mix with art galleries. So did the Flatiron District, in the wedge-shaped shadow of the Flatiron Building.

  That neighborhood’s identity has become so much a part of the city’s consciousness that real estate agents no longer bother to advertise apartments there as “near Gramercy Park.” And nowadays prices on the Upper West Side are higher than the Upper East side which used to be the most fashionable, most expensive slice of New York. Thanks to long tradition and fairly tight zoning restrictions, there are still no big stores on Park Avenue between 59th and 96th Streets (and only a handful of small ones). But maybe it’s only a matter of time.

  Greater New York, Now the Second Largest City in the World

  May 9, 1897

  The Brooklyn Eagle Almanac celebrates the consolidation in 1898.

  THERE IS ALREADY A PUBLIC PARK AREA OF nearly 7,000 acres in the five boroughs, with elaborate plans of park extension under consideration in Brooklyn and Queens.

  No consolidation with sister communities was needed to make New York an imperial city. With her unsurpassed location, a constantly decreasing death rate, a population that nearly touches the two million mark and $4 billion of wealth, she already wears royal honors. So great is she, indeed, that she is obliged to submit to a division under the new scheme and go piecemeal into greater New York as the two boroughs of Manhattan and of the Bronx.

  Here is a city containing already 6 square miles of territory, 102,000 buildings, 1,560,000 inhabitants, 750 miles of streets, 575 miles of sewers, 5,000 acres of parks, and a water supply of 300,000,000 gallons per day; a city illuminated nightly by 40,000 lamps (gas and electric) and protected by 5,000 policemen; and a city in which the street railways carry 1,370,000 passengers each day.

  But the new municipality is more even than that. It is about 32 miles long and from 12 to 18 miles in width, containing about 360 square miles of territory;

  But the new municipality is more even than that. It is about 32 miles long and from 12 to 18 miles in width, containing about 360 square miles of territory; a municipality including the five boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond; a municipality containing a population of 3,312,000. In this great new city there are 54 jurisdictions of sufficient importance
to have a federal postmaster. There is an aggregate tangible wealth of real and personal property amounting to $4,560,000,000. There is a waterfront of nearly 300 miles—this is in reality a city on the ocean. No such exposure to outside attack has ever before been made by a great and rich city.

  Celebrating a Century Of Uneasy Unity

  By DOUGLAS MARTIN | May 4, 1997

  The completion of the Brooklyn Bridge opened the way for the 1898 consolidation.

  THE MAYORS OF BROOKLYN AND NEW YORK vetoed the idea, only to be overridden by the State Legislature. Preachers in Brooklyn railed against it. The State Senate defeated it, then changed its mind.

  Clearly, the welding of the modern New York City from more than 40 local governments a century ago was not easy. But as the city begins a yearlong 100th birthday party for itself, there is a strong view that it was historically inevitable. Ruth Abram, president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, sees the creation of the new city as a direct reaction to social, political and economic strife that had torn America since the Civil War.

  “This deep-seated yearning for union may explain why the opponents of the consolidation of New York simply could not prevail,” she said.

  To be sure, there are other views, not the least being that consolidation represented a last-ditch effort by the ruling elite to cement its power in the face of waves of immigrants. But the importance of Gov. Frank S. Black’s signature on what is known as “Chapter 378 of the Laws of 1897,” a three-inch thick document dated May 4, 1897, is incontrovertible. It redefined New York from being just Manhattan and the Bronx, both then part of New York County, to include the other three boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island—which had been separate.