You Had Me at ‘Welcome to New York—Have a Cookie’

December 16, 2020 ~ autumninnewyork11 ~ 2 Comments

We are leaving New York City. This is the final post in this blog. I write this with profound mixed feelings, but the move is necessary and, ultimately, will be beneficial. More about that in a minute.

I never expected to live here. It was always an interesting place to visit but …. cliché. My first “encounter” with the city this time occurred when I arrived to get the keys to our apartment. I decided to grab a couple of slices (pizza, for the uninitiated) at Fluffies, a rather inelegant “restaurant/cafe” at the corner of Ninth Avenue and West 58^th Street [since closed by the pandemic]. Fluffies had pizzas arrayed in glass cases, already baked and ready to be reheated briefly, so little waiting while you sat at one of the remarkably small tables on a remarkably uncomfortable plastic chair. The pizza was middling quality but good enough, as I perused diagrams of how we planned to set up our furniture.

A largish man, whom I later understood was the owner, approached with my Coke and, to my amazement, asked if I lived around there. I said I was about to move into the towers at One Columbus Place. He nodded and went to pursue other duties. As I finished my pizza and prepared to get up, the owner appeared again, slapped a large Black & White cookie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white_cookie] on the table and said “Welcome to New York!”

Now, that’s a New York story, if ever I heard one. The city reputed for its hostile environment, for rudeness in that special New York style, and then “have a cookie on us.”

It took about two weeks to complete my rapture with this place. True enough, it was noisy (there are noise ordinances but like many other “rules” they are not enforced), crowded, rushed, dirty in some places, often in shadow, windy … and more. It was also New York City that should be a Wonder of the World.

Here I fell in love with ballet after seeing and photographing the Continuum Contemporary/Ballet company in a free (yes, free and a front row seat) performance at Bryant Park. See https://autumninnewyork.net/2018/06/18/ballet-bryant-park/ before it’s too late. This led to many extraordinary evenings at Lincoln Center, a short walk from our apartment, where we reveled in the stunning, often super-human, performance of many classics of the genre. I still can see the stage when the curtain rose and the audience spontaneously roared over the spectacular colors for the amazing Jewels. We bought a membership in New York City Ballet and were able to attend rehearsals of the orchestra and dress rehearsals of major performance which were, for all practical purposes, the actual performances. Breathtaking in every way.

And so it went. Jazz clubs (Jazz at Lincoln Center just a short walk away, the Vanguard and others), Broadway shows, museums, endless stores selling anything and everything, restaurants of every imaginable and unimaginable type, concerts, Central Park – OMG, Central Park where we walked and walked and watched birds and people and dogs and … rats … and jazz bands and the end of the New York City Marathon and so much more – poetry clubs. New York City has it all. Over 200 languages are spoken here and on any given outing you can expect to hear several of them.

Getting around requires some basic understanding of the subway system as well as how to hail a taxi, how to summon an Uber/Lyft. New Yorkers tend to be ‘New Yorkish’ in their dealings with people they don’t know, but if you don’t take it personally, you find most of them are helpful if asked politely. Sometimes they will ask you for directions or other information. They won’t often say “thank you,” not, I think because they want to be rude, but because they don’t want to waste time and it’s a give-and-take situation that they’ll be on the other side of soon enough. It all balances out without wasting time with too many niceties. They want information, not a relationship.

The pandemic and the response to the murder of George Floyd ripped the heart out of New York City in a way that was and still is hard to grasp. The place that had some of the largest marches for women’s’ and minorities’ rights, and in which we participated numerous times, the city with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and the Fifth Avenue Christmas lights and Rockefeller Center’s tree and all the rest, was laid waste. As we prepare to depart, Times Square is an empty and sullen place. The virus is resurgent, and humanity is in retreat yet again as we confront the consequences of people refusing to accept the science. The vaccines are arriving as we depart, but so many people say they will not be vaccinated.

One is led to believe that Americans have grown soft. Our consumerist economy and culture have left us with millions of countrymen whining about being unable to go to a bar whenever they want, or unable to work out in their gym like they could in the Before Times. This is the same country that survived the Great Depression and defeated the Japanese and the Nazis in a global two-front war that lasted four years and saw rationing of food and a multitude of other “necessities.” People worked around the clock, seven days a week to support the war effort. Women took up jobs conceived for men who went off to war. Women too fought and died in the war. Now we have millions of people unwilling to be inconvenienced in order to stamp out a virus that has killed more than 300,000 Americans so far and is raging out of control across the country.

I digress, but I am struck every day by how Americans seem to have changed. This is not a political blog – I have https://shiningseaUSA.com for that and will have more to say there about what I believe has happened to us. For now, suffice to note that we leave this extraordinary place with heavy but hopeful hearts. We lost a family member to COVID recently and that still weighs on us. But my wife is returning to school, to a Georgetown University program in non-profit management which will lead to other interesting challenges soon enough. Our departing New York City is, in the end, a new beginning and not a true ending.

And this great metropolis will never end. The city is such a remarkable place –it must rebound, and I believe it will do so in time. America is not the same without it. Indeed, the world is not the same without it. New York City is testament to all that we can be and much that we must strive to avoid. Like all of this nation, it aspires to heights that cannot always be achieved but in the reaching, in the breadth of it is its greatness. When it is safe to do so one fine day, we will return here, again and again, to re-experience everything that only a place like New York City could ever begin to deliver, a theme-park of human culture and diversity, truly a Wonder of the World. Believe.

Holiday Lights

January 12, 2020 ~ autumninnewyork11 ~ 2 Comments

Better late than never, I suppose, the following sample of photos was taken while we were showing a good friend around the city on a cold and not-quite-wet night before Christmas.. The first ten shots are from the holiday fair at Bryant Park and the lion statue at the New York Public Library. The rest are mainly from stores along 5th Avenue, plus, of course, Rockefeller Center where the large tree attracts huge numbers of viewers every night. The sequence of castle-like light displays is from the facade of Saks Fifth Avenue, a spectacular show that also attracts huge crowds.Happy Belated Holidays!

Ballet in Bryant Park

June 18, 2018June 18, 2018 ~ autumninnewyork11 ~ 4 Comments

The first time I saw ballet performed was an exhibition in St. Petersburg many years ago. The performances were brief but spectacular, especially the leaps of the male performers. I had never seen anything to equal it, but it did not trigger a passion to see more. Indeed, I found the length and pace of the traditional ballets I later saw as a bit much, though, again, the artistry and sheer physical power of the performers was almost supernatural.

When we arrived in New York, one of the obvious benefits of our location was Lincoln Center, literally a few blocks from our apartment. And, miraculously, within months, the one ballet I really did want to see, Stravinsky’s The Firebird, was scheduled for the Metropolitan Opera House. The added treat was entitled AFTERITE, danced to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, one of my favorite pieces of classical music, with Misty Copeland to boot! As a side note, we were so excited to see all this that we sprang, first time ever, for box seats. They turned out to be cramped and difficult for viewing unless you were in front row or elevated third row (we weren’t). I was also interested to observe that in order to enter the box at any time, an attendant, usually nearby, had to unlock the door. I kept thinking of Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. As a further and final side note, we didn’t much care for AFTERITE. Misty Copeland’s amazing talent was largely wasted as her role involved more standing and walking around the stage than dancing.

But I digress. All of the above being true, I remain an uninformed, inexpert observer of ballet, but still awed by the superhuman effort, grace, athleticism and artistry of the dancers. So, facing Friday night with my wife out of town on business, I went to Bryant Park for what was advertised as a “A Night of Ballet, including a Master Class led by Cynthia Harvey, Artistic Director of the American Ballet Theatre Onassis School, a discussion of personal histories with two ABT Company dancers and performances by three local New York City ballet companies.

Bryant Park shares with the New York Public Library the rectangle bounded by 5^th and 6^th Avenues and West 40^th and 42^nd Streets. There is a lot going on there all the time. See http://bryantpark.org/

Arriving early, I snagged a seat in the first row, on the stage side of the rope separating the walkway from the Lawn in front of the Fountain Terrace. After the Master Class, in which I did not participate [contain your amusement] and the discussion, the first group of dancers came onto the stage. The first good shot I managed to get is the featured photo at the top of this post. There is nothing meaningful I can say about the extraordinary talent of these young dancers except that I was mesmerized. Rather than pretend to be a critic, for which I am, as noted above, grossly unqualified, I will let the photographs speak for themselves.

I’m just going to show a small sample of the shots I took that night. The first group, Continuum Contemporary/Ballet, danced Concerto Geloso to the amazing music of Vivaldi. The second “group” is just two dancers, from Doug Baum & Artists performing Tangle, and the final group is Da’Von Doane & The Artists of the Shift performing Dances for Brass: Sacred and Profane. These photos do not do full justice to the performance because they lack the music and the continuity of the moves, but I think you’ll get the idea.