Life In New York: How I Learned to Love Squeegee Men, Token Suckers, Trash Twisters, and Subway Sharks
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Life In New York: How I Learned to Love Squeegee Men, Token Suckers, Trash Twisters, and Subway Sharks
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781936218165 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Life in New York
How I Learned to Love Squeegee Men, Token Suckersm Trash Twisters, and Subway Sharks
By Laura Pedersen
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 2015 Laura PedersenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936218-15-8
CHAPTER 1
I'll Take Manhattan
As my bus lurched toward the Lincoln Tunnel a sign proclaimed: no trucks over 12' 6". Underneath, in equally large letters, was painted: we mean it! Obviously I was entering a reckless, self-destructive society that couldn't or, more likely, wouldn't follow the kind of simple direction I'd learned in kindergarten. Back home in Buffalo, when my teacher told us not to eat paste she didn't need to tack on a threat. And upon exiting the Thruway near the house where I grew up it wasn't unusual to see a woman hand her entire purse over to the toll taker if she'd just had her nails done. After the Lincoln Tunnel sign I was half expecting a troll to ask me a riddle before I was allowed to enter the Big Bad City.
Having been raised minutes from the border I probably had more in common with Canadians than your average New Yorker. For instance, we Buffalonians know that if you play goalie they have to pick you for the team. Also, that peeing in a snowsuit to keep warm does not work the same way it does in a wetsuit – this will just make you colder and cause no small measure of embarrassment all around. I also knew that nose breathing in winter is better than mouth breathing for staying warm and hydrated. And that if you forget your lock de-icer you have to find a guy to pee in the lock for you. Clearly I was going to need a new skill set in this city of sharp right angles.
Of course, I wasn't the first out-of-towner to arrive in Manhattan with nothing except high hopes. Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian explorer and part-time pirate who was working for the French, dropped anchor in 1524. He was met by Native Americans who'd inhabited the area since around 10,000 BC, developing into the Iroquoian and Algonquin cultures. Verrazzano was followed by English explorer Henry Hudson, who was searching for a route to the Orient on behalf of investors from the Netherlands, and staked a land claim in 1609.
A local Lenni Lenape Indian told him the place was called Manna-hata, which is usually translated as "hilly island," albeit another version holds that the name came from a similar Indian word for "place of general inebriation." Eventually the hills would be mostly razed for development, but in its long and flamboyant history the city has certainly never lacked for spirits. That's why there's a famous cocktail called a Manhattan, while no one goes into a bar and orders a Minneapolis, a Des Moines, or a Moline.
The Dutch first settled in the lower part of Manhattan, now known as the Financial District, and it didn't take long for the world's most famous trade to occur. In 1626, Peter Minuit, the director of the Dutch colony, bought Manhattan from the Indians for goods valued at around $24. However, one could just as easily argue that the adroit traders here were the Indians since they didn't believe in land ownership so much as stewardship – and therefore the Europeans were trying to buy something that couldn't be bought in the first place.
Along with the desirable real estate came the magnificent place where the continent met the ocean, and created the world's finest natural harbor. It was blessed with deep channels, sheltered ships from storms by extending inland for seventeen miles, and was rarely clogged with ice or else fogbound.
The colony of New Netherland, with its capital of New Amsterdam located at the southern tip of Manhattan, was exceptional from the start. Its reason for being didn't stem from a search for religious freedom, an escape from political strife, or sons being drafted into the army but rather for the sole purpose of commerce. In fact, it would take eight years before anyone got around to building a church, though not because of any labor or lumber shortages, since several dozen saloons had gone up easily enough.
Originally focused around fur trading, but quickly expanding into agriculture and slave trafficking, commerce continued to trump conscience and political allegiances in the bustling settlement. Thus it also served as a popular haven for pirates, with the infamous Captain William Kidd owning a house on Pearl Street and a pew in Trinity Church. The citizenry was a rowdy polyglot, speaking eighteen different languages and frequenting a profusion of taverns, drinking clubs, and grogshops by the time the British came calling in 1664. Gathered in the harbor were only 450 soldiers aboard four ships, but the 8,000 residents couldn't be bothered with whose face was on their money so long as they were able to keep making it. Director-General Peter Stuyvesant was forced to give up the whole settlement to the British so the locals could go right on farming and trading. Even Stuyvesant's seventeen-year-old son welcomed the English invaders. The Dutch city was soon renamed after the Duke of York, brother to King Charles II.
Old Man Stuyvesant duly packed up and paddled back to Old Netherland to fill out the requisite "loss of colony" paperwork. However, after tidying up his career-ending affairs, Stuyvesant returned to his farm in the colony where he and his family spent their remaining years as full-fledged New Yorkers in the capital of capitalism. In return for his service, New York named the large residential development now located on the site Stuyvesant Town, or "Stuy Town" in local parlance, while Stuyvesant High School is one of the finest public secondary schools in the city, and a neighborhood in Brooklyn is called Stuyvesant Heights.
There were two wars still to come between the locals and their new landlords, but by 1820 New York was the leading port of entry for Europe's exports to America. Its entrepreneurial residents were the first to get cutting-edge ideas and inventions from Europe and capitalize or improve on them. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the city became the transfer point for crops and merchandise going between the Midwest and the rest of the East Coast as well as Europe. Soon planters in the South began sending their cotton directly to wholesalers in New York, who would take their commissions and ship it onward to the mills of New England. New York was fast becoming the most influential city in the Western World and a magnet for ambitious people from around the globe.
CHAPTER 2On the Sidewalks of New York
My entry point to Manhattan from Buffalo was not the grandiose Grand Central Terminal but rather the grotesque Port Authority, a monolithic bus depot on the West Side in Midtown. This steel and concrete block constructed in the style known as Maximum Security Prison shows up on most lists of the World's Ugliest Buildings, and if somewhere there is indeed an architectural monstrosity slightly uglier, I have yet to see it. That said, the inside was even worse. Imagine an Off Track Betting parlor in the lobby of a flophouse.
I arrived in New York City in January 1984 BC – Before Computerization. At least it was before personal computers had landed in every home, store, and office. Back then computers were large, expensive machines used by universities, corporations, and governments for math problems, credit card authorization, military purposes, and weather forecasting; a far cry from the porn and cat-photo delivery systems we know them as today. Before the Internet and electronic signage, information booths were necessary for getting subway, bus, and train route particulars and track numbers, especially since there never seemed to be any maps in stock. Half-mile-long lines snaked from kiosks staffed by one or two employees who acted not bored but truly annoyed, as if you were keeping them from something much more important, such as finalizing a nuclear arms treaty or decoding the human genome. They were downright surly, and if you didn't understand what was being said, their only concession was to talk louder and faster.
There were no mobile phones affordable to us mere peasants, and the payphone banks at the Port Authority were monopolized by pimps and drug dealers. If you did manage to commandeer one, an intrepid bystander would steal your calling card number and sell it to people who would make several thousand dollars' worth of phone calls to the Caribbean within the next ninety minutes.
A statue of actor Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, the lunchbox-carrying, working-class bus driver from The Honeymooners, stands outside the Port Authority to help further set its tone as the place where dreams do indeed come true. I wasn't the first recession refugee seeking self-creation, reinvention, and public service on a national scale, or to become "one singular sensation" as defined by A Chorus Line. In fact, I was probably the tenth that day, and it was only noon. There were already enough expatriates from Western New York to start our own enclave called Little Buffalo and set up chicken wing stands. But we economic exiles were prepared to hunker down and prove ourselves. Except for people like my friend Mary, who moved to New York for the express purpose of letting some time elapse in order to clear points off her driver's license.
It was two years after Ronald Reagan had assumed office and declared "Morning in America." One of the government's policies was to release mental patients so they could experience the sunrise firsthand. Cutbacks in social programs flooded the streets with people who were psychiatrically challenged and/or suffering from substance abuse. New York City and especially its public facilities were awash with street people, some with hospital bracelets still visible on their wrists. They were panhandling, muttering to themselves, or just camping out, having set up makeshift open-air studio apartments in vacant lots, parks, church vestibules, empty doorways, atop sidewalk grates, under highway exit ramps, and along the East River seawall and the Hudson River's crumbling piers. A prominent feature of these corrugated cardboard hovels was the "I [??] NY" plastic shopping bag. As it happened, in the city's darkest days a tourism campaign had been launched with this upbeat logo in black letters embracing a bright red heart on a stark white background. In no time, these bags became ubiquitous as the de rigueur luggage of the homeless, and the must-get tourist photo was the raggedy jangling street person in heavily layered clothing pushing a stolen shopping cart that acted as a portable closet, or asleep in a vestibule, clutching the prominently displayed I [??] NY bag. Perhaps the better slogan would've been "NY: We'll Pick Your Pocket and Steal Your Heart."
Another bit of local color at bus and train stations, street corners, and parks were groups of young people with radiator-size boom boxes break dancing on giant slabs of cardboard. Tourists and commuters with a few minutes until their bus or train departed gathered to watch while an opportunistic pickpocket unrelated to the group worked the crowd. It was impossible not to notice how talented these kids were – hopping, popping, locking, freezing, sliding, and spinning on their heads. This was a far cry from the hokey pokey, chicken dance, and beer barrel polka of my Western New York youth. Hip-hop, with its fast, rhythmic beat and self-expressive stream-of-consciousness rhymes, was rising from the ashes of the South Bronx on its way to taking over the music business and becoming a giant cash cow. I can only hope those gifted performers went along for the ride. One Shawn Carter progressed from dealing drugs in a Brooklyn housing project to captain of the rap industry under the more familiar name Jay Z.
In front of the major transportation centers, a scruffy legion of self-appointed baggage handlers and taxi hailers battled to grab your stuff, shove everything into a cab, and extort a fee. Tourists were unacquainted with the improvisational nature of the system and were pounced upon so swiftly that most had no choice but to go with the flow and produce some change or a dollar bill. Nowadays, when I see professional taxi stands staffed by uniformed workers, I'm reminded that they were forged through brutal entrepreneurship, more than a few robberies, and some inappropriate touching.
Between the problems of the nation and a personal budget gap, I was unable to afford a New York apartment and would need to accept an offer from one of the pimps lurking in Port Authority alcoves to snare runaway girls, or freeload off my retired eighty-one-year-old grandfather in Huntington on Long Island. My silver moon boots, purple snorkel jacket with neon-orange lining, and cap with the piglet earflaps didn't seem to say "working girl" so much as "girl in need of work," and so off to Long Island I went.
CHAPTER 3A Hole in the Ground
I'm always stunned to arrive in another city and discover actual upholstery making the public transportation system more homey and comfortable. Instead of being jealous, I humbly accept that we New Yorkers can't be trusted with anything but molded plastic. You get the subway you deserve.
The first underground subway opened in 1904, almost thirty-five years after the first elevated train line started transporting New Yorkers up and down the West Side between Lower Manhattan and the Bronx. In 1938, when my father was seven, he could ride the subway from his apartment building in Washington Heights to the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West or Professor Heckler's Flea Circus on West 42nd Street. In Times Square he'd watch comedies starring Charlie Chaplin and westerns featuring Big Boy Williams. The fare was a nickel, a double feature also cost a nickel, and so did a Hershey's bar, as he never failed to remind me during the runaway inflation of the 1970s. No one thought for a moment he was taking his life in his hands by riding the subway alone, nor did the police bring my grandmother in for questioning.
Dad also regularly rode the elevated railway ("the El"), which loomed above Third Avenue. This monstrosity of rusting girders, columns, tracks, and railings blocked out great patches of sunlight on the pavement below and made real estate much less desirable than that situated a block away on Lexington Avenue. Dad said the trains were noisy, grimy, and shaky like a bad amusement park ride, but the good thing was if you forgot to bring a book it was fun to look into the windows of all the people going about their domestic routines. He liked to imagine himself as Dashiell Hammett's private detective Nick Charles working a case while starring in a radio drama.
The El was demolished (most would say thankfully) in 1955 before Dad had a chance to conclusively solve any crimes, but can still be experienced in all its eyesore glory in dozens of old movies such as The Lost Weekend and On the Bowery. The only advice Dad gave me upon announcing that I was leaving for the big, bad city was not to fall asleep on the subway because someone would steal my shoes.
When I arrived in Manhattan a token cost 75 cents. So did a slice of pizza. Oddly, the cost of pizza slices and tokens basically rose in tandem for more than a half century, and this law of economics became known as the "Pizza Principle." It was also called "The New York Pizza Connection," which sounds more like a mozzarella laundering operation, but actually has nothing to do with the gang that distributed more than $1 billion of heroin that was smuggled through local pizza parlors and resulted in the 1985 "Pizza Connection Trial." However, while the price of a subway ride has skyrocketed to $2.75, a round of vicious price wars has recently put the $1 slice back on the menu in pizza parlor – heavy areas. No one complains about oil prices in New York, just the cost of subway, bus, and cab fares; tolls for bridges and tunnels; and of course that perennial mainstay, the pizza slice. In Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing the trouble starts when a pizza parlor customer grumbles about the price of his slice.
By 1983 the entire subway system had been reduced to a labyrinth of subterranean urinals connected by tunnels, and was the preferred operating ground for recently released felons, parole violators, addled veterans, sexual deviants, and homeless people.
Whereas in most cities winter is followed by spring, here signs informed me that it was "Chain Snatching Season" and warned, "Please don't flash a lot of jewelry. Tuck in your chains. Don't flash your bracelets and watches. Turn your rings around so the stones don't show. There are only 3,400 transit police. They can't be everywhere, all the time. If you want to keep it, don't flaunt it." Good to know, thanks. Happy spring to you too.
Stairwells, platforms, token booths, and cars were festooned with graffiti inside and out and from top to bottom including windows, doors, ceilings, floors, rooftops, and route maps. In many ways the spray-painted balloon letters, cartoon figures, and mysterious swirls were a joyous relief to the grimy drabness of a blighted soul-crushing landscape, with this vibrant art filling a void, both situational and spiritual. The platforms had no clocks and took on the surreal timelessness of a coal mine or casino. A sensible design choice, since why would New Yorkers hurrying to catch the subway to work or school in the morning with hands full of bags, briefcases, umbrellas, and lattes need to look at the time anyway?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life in New York by Laura Pedersen. Copyright © 2015 Laura Pedersen. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionChapter One: I’ll Take Manhattan
Chapter Two: On the Sidewalks of New York
Chapter Three: A Hole in the Ground
Chapter Four: Licensed to Thrill
Chapter Five: Rental Illness
Chapter Six: Man (and Woman) in Black
Chapter Seven: A Helluva Town
Chapter Eight: Stayin’ Alive
Chapter Nine: Carpe Noctem
Chapter Ten: The Real March Madness
Chapter Eleven: In the Hoods
Chapter Twelve: NYITS: New Yorkers in Training
Chapter Thirteen: I’ve Always Depended on the Knishes of Strangers
Chapter Fourteen: Twelve Angry New Yorkers
Chapter Fifteen: Urban Dictionary
Chapter Sixteen: I Saw Mommy Kissing the Tree Man
Chapter Seventeen: Humidity City
Chapter Eighteen: Tails of New York
Chapter Nineteen: Wall Street Bull
Chapter Twenty: Sects and the City
Chapter Twenty-One: Graffiti Goes Pro
Chapter Twenty-Two: Treadmills, Trans Fats, and Treatments
Chapter Twenty-Three: Time’s Winged Taxicab