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How Many Stories in the Naked City?
Summertime and the living, in New York at least, is a little weird.
It is always the way, so I have come to expect the flood of strange news that fills the tabloids every summer. It's as if all the freakiest people have been trying for months to control themselves and then once a large chunk of the population starts vacationing or going off to beachy summer shares, decides that the time is right to let it all hang out.
Yesterday a man committed suicide by putting his head on the third rail of a downtown number 6 subway train (shades of The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3- a winter movie, but still)
On Monday the New York Post broke the story that prostitutes are finally (finally!) reclaiming the streets of Hell's Kitchen "not far from cops posted at the Lincoln Tunnel to thwart potential terrorist attacks." (Is the concern here that they will distract New York's Finest? It seems that an opportunity is being overlooked and these folks could be recruited as low-rent Mata Hari-s- they're looking in the cars anyway.)
But of course all of the standard oddities (oxymoronic, I know) have been overshadowed by the Divorce That Shook Manhattan. A doctor, having been ordered to sell his Upper East Side townhouse (valued at anywhere from $4-9 million) and give half the proceeds to his ex-wife took a different route. He decided to kill himself and take the building with him by tampering with the gas line and exploding the whole thing. He survived though sadly the building didn't. Several people were hurt, though no one is expected not to make a recovery.
There are plenty of facets of this story to lament, but one of them is that this was a historic building, a landmark, according to the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and had been the site of some intrigue. In 1917, a group of "prominent New Yorkers" founded a group that they called "The Room" and held covert gossip sessions at 34 East 62nd Street (then a rental building). According to the New York Times, the crowd included enough names to keep conspiracy theorists happy for weeks: "Vincent Astor, a close friend of Roosevelt; the book publisher Nelson Doubleday; Winthrop W. Aldrich, the president of the Chase National Bank; Kermit Roosevelt, a son of Theodore Roosevelt, David K. E. Bruce, a son-in-law of Andrew W. Mellon and a future ambassador to France, West Germany and Britain; the philanthropist William Rhinelander Stewart; and Marshall Field III, a newspaper publisher and heir to the Chicago department store fortune." The Room made itself particularly useful during the Second World War by helping President Roosevelt with counterespionage.
So this is one of those things that makes New York fabulous, in spite of the fact that it took a nutcase and a building collapse to bring it to mind*: there is always something going on underneath- every story is personal. I think about this all the time, when I see the buildings on the Landmark Conservancy's endangered list or when I remember that as much as my parents hate the bar in their building, Louis Armstrong used to play there with some regularity.
I even think about it when the crap underneath provides entertainment for my kid. Just now, as he was about to lose it, his tantrum was stopped in its tracks by the arrival of a DEP truck. An environmental protection guy hopped out, pulled up a manhole cover and sent his truck's curious crane machine under the sidewalk to grab huge bunches of sewer-clogging gook. The man knew his audience. Felix was delighted and it's always interesting to watch how things really work.
*So before you go shouting, I'm not diminishing the fear, the damage, the mess and all the other awfulness that goes along with a building collapse.
posted by Elise at 10:24 AM
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