Urban Gadabout: Noshwalks, "Steamboat Bill Jr.," Long Island Art Deco, and mudh more (Fall gadding preview, Part 2)

Tomorrow evening movies return to Washington Heights' gorgeous, nearly 3400-seat United Palace Theater [click to enlarge], built in 1930 as Loew's 175th Street, the last of Loew's five 1929-30 "Wonder Theaters" in NYC and Jersey City, as the Buster Keaton silent masterpiece Steamboat Bill Jr. is shown with live organ accompaniment. Advance tickets, available online through today only, are $10. (Tickets tomorrow night will be $15, $10 for seniors.)

by Ken

As I explained Wednesday in Part 1 of this fall gadding preview, what I intended as a brief note on Myra Alperson's Noshwalks, which I haven't written about before, grew out of hand, and so had to be spun off into a Part 2, which has given me an opportunity to include some other odds 'n' ends, including the screening, with live organ accompaniment (by silent film music composer, organist, and orchestrator Bernie Anderson), of Buster Keaton's 1928 classic Steamboat Bill Jr. at the United Palace Theater in my own northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.

We'll get to the Noshwalks et al., but first --

STEAMBOAT BILL JR. AT THE UNITED PALACE THEATER



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Mark the dates for this year's Open House New York Weekend: October 17-18 -- and check out these upcoming OHNY events

by Ken

Open House New York is probably still best known for the mid-October weekend that is one of NYC's great events, Open House New York, where the general public is offered rare, often this-time-only access to sites of all sorts in all five boroughs, and to talks, and to tours of projects of every description that are planned, or under construction, or recently completed -- always guided by people intimately involved with the site or project.

The full schedule isn't announced until shortly before the great event, but bits of information may be dribbled out earlier, so you want to keep checking the OHNY website. (It couldn't be much easier to remember: ohny. org). OHNY members get a slightly earlier peek at the full schedule, but come the start of registration everyone's thrown into the same online maelstrom -- the saving grace being that there are so many events of such diverse interest that for most tastes some of the most interesting ones aren't among the most popular.


AND CHECK OUT THESE OTHER UPCOMING EVENTS

I said above that OHNY is "probably still best known" OHNY Weekend, but the OHNY schedule is now so jammed with fascinating events that I've come to think of OHNY Weekend as almost the least of it. We'd be here all night if I tried to list the places I've been and the things I've done in my year and two-thirds as a member.

Most events are open to non-members, but members get the advantages of prompt e-announcements of events and significant discounts -- or even free admission, especially in the case of lecture-type events like the new series of presentations on projects still in the planning stage, like the redevelopment of the highly visible former Domino Sugar Factory on the Williamsburg (Brooklyn) waterfront. And there are members-only events. (Note the "special combo" package of event-plus-membership offered for the Gowanus Canal Boat Tour.)

You'll also get to see most if not all of the hard-working OHNY team at most every event. They're good people -- you'll like them. If you're curious about past events, many of which are parts of still-ongoing series, you can find listings of "Recent Program" following the "Upcoming Programs" section of the website "Programs" page, and reports on many of them on the OHNY Blog. For information about membership, click here. In case it isn 't obvious, this is an exceedingly worthy organization to support.

Now let's get to those upcoming events.


A boat trip up Brooklyn's, er, historic Gowanus Canal

I can't believe these won't fill up pretty quickly. If you think you might be interested, you should check it out pronto and see if there are still places.



Gowanus Canal Boat Tour
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Tours at 5 and 7 pm

Following the successive openings of the Erie Canal in 1825 and Brooklyn's Atlantic Basin in 1841, the Gowanus Canal grew to become the busiest commercial waterway in the United States for almost four decades, from 1915 through the early 1950s. Today, the Canal is contaminated from this past intensive industrial use, as well as ongoing dumping from the city sewage system, but there are ambitious plans for its restoration and redevelopment. Join David Briggs, director of Gowanus by Design, and Andrea Parker, director of Gowanus Canal Conservancy, along with representatives from the US Environmental Protection Agency working on the canal's cleanup, for a boat tour along "Brooklyn's coolest SuperFUNd Site" to learn about how one of New York City's most polluted waterways is being reimagined for future generations as a model for 21st century urban planning.

Registration
$30 OHNY Members
$40 General Admission
$75 Special Combo: 1 General Admission + 1 Friend Membership

Registration is in progress here.


And the next two events in OHNY's "Final Mile" series

We've done with the bus pilgrimages to the Hunts Point peninsula in the Bronx, where we had the amazing opportunities to tour the operations of: two of the three public wholesale markets operated by the NYC Economic Development Corp., the New Fulton Fish Market (for that one we had to meet in front of OHNY's office by 3:45am for a 4am departure!) and the Hunts Point Produce Market (the Hunts Point Meat Market, we were told, is differently structured and doesn't offer tours); and two enormous distribution operations, Baldor Specialty Foods and Food Bank NYC. It was four one-of-a-kind events, but the "Final Mile: Food Systems of New York" series is a year-long project, and these next events look pretty darned interesting too!


Registration is in progress here.


Registration begins Monday, July 20 (normally at 10am).


There's also this note concerning upcoming installments of the "Final Mile" series":

Fifty percent of the food that New Yorkers consume every day is supplied by the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. But what about that other half of the food we eat? This summer, Open House New York's year-long series The Final Mile: Food Systems of New York will continue its exploration of how food shapes the urban environment through visits to a mix of typologically diverse sites where food distribution is integrated more directly into the multi-use urban fabric of the city.

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To market, to market! Or: Daybreak over the (New) Fulton Fish Market

Photo courtesy of the NYC Economic Development Corp. (NYCEDC)

Set your alarm clock early for a trip to the New Fulton Fish Market with OHNY and New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), where you’ll see the principal wholesale market for seafood in the New York City area in full swing. Learn about the history of the market, located in the historic South Street Seaport area until 2005, on the bus ride there, and then walk the massive market shed with Security Director Victor Seguinot. Talk to vendors, jobbers, buyers, and other market regulars and hear about life in the city’s food hub.

--the description of today's Open House New York tour, in
the series The Final Mile: Food Systems of New York

by Ken

It was, chronologically speaking, about as an unusual outing as I can recall ever undertaking. I tore out of my apartment building in Washington Heights a little after 2:45am on whichever day it was (yesterday? today?) and ambled back in the downstairs door in broad daylight a little before 8:30 that (this?) same morning.

The "little after" 2:45 is important, because according to what I'd gleaned from the MTA's online schedule information, there should be a train coming through my station about 2:56. Of course, that didn't mean there'd be a train at exactly 2:56, so I'd hoped to make it a little earlier just in case, because the information I tended to trust more from what I'd gleaned was that at that hour the train was running every 20 minutes, and while I probably would have been okay with a hypothetical train coming through at 3:16, that would be cutting it close. After all, I still had to do a change of trains at Times Square.

The time I was aiming for was the start of check-in at the office of Open House New York, at Broadway and 26th Street, at 3:45am, but if I could be screwed if I didn't make it by 4am, at which time the bus was supposedly leaving for sure for the trip up to the Hunts Point peninsula of the South Bronx for our visit to the (New) Fulton Fish Market. Meaning that if I'd been out of the house really and truly at 2:45, I should have had a fairly easy time catching a train that passed through at 2:56. But the few minutes I lost to slow-motionness with the three hours' sleep I'd notched put that schedule in jeopardy. Hence the "tearing out" of my building.

Where there's a will there's a way, sometimes, and I actually got to the platform a good minute before the train, which actually arrived maybe a minute early! Score! According to the station countdown clocks, the next train was indeed 20 minutes away. The rest looked to be easy, and it was. I had placed myself almost perfectly on the train to head up the stairs at Times Square for the walk to the southbound BMT platform and even made a good connection to an N train that was indeed making local stops (in the event of an express, I was prepared to walk the distance from 34th Street), and a little after 3:35 I approached a cluster of people outside a bus parked at the sidewalk, with the OHNY people on the job to check me in and pass me through to board the bus!

For the outing we were given excellent "dress code" instructions, which called for "hard-soled, closed-toed shoes that you don't mind getting a little dirty" ("the fish market will be at its most active during our visit, so it may be a little messy") and included this advisory:

The fish market is, as you might imagine, a pungent place. You may want to bring a change of clothes if you are planning to go directly to work after the tour. According to people we've spoken with who've been to the market before, the smell of fish will linger on your clothes.

Luckily, I had cleared the day from work and didn't plan to continue on to the job, in either smelly old or fresh new clothes.

Of course the bus didn't leave on the dot at 4, but not that much after we indeed had our busload of hardy nocturnal adventurers in place, and we rolled out in time to roll into the parking lot not much after 5 for the final stage of the day's market activity. They get going, we learned, at midnight, and for a good part of that time there's a lot of activity, as the day's procession of buyers -- wholesalers, retailers, restaurateurs, brokers, even the odd retail buyer -- arrive to inspect the offerings of the more than two dozen purveyors lining the two sides of the well-refrigerated indoor grand allée that is the (New) Fulton Fish Market, make their choices, and have their purchases loaded onto forklifts for conveyance out to their waiting trucks for the trip on to, well, wherever the chosen fish and seafood -- most of it on ice but still fresh is destined.

It's an incredibly complex symphony, this meeting up of sellers and buyers, as buyers choose when during those hours of market to arrive for their hoped-for optimal combination of ultimate freshness, choice, and pricing. The sellers are, as they have been since the Fulton Fish Market came into existence down on South Street, and certainly since the new market at Hunts Point opened in 2005, in competition with each other, and the most obvious thing they have to compete with during each day's market is price. All of the buyers know what they're looking for, and what they're looking at. At the end of each day's market everyone packs up and prepares to do it all again the next day.

Which is how, if I got the figure right, some 50 percent of the fish and seafood coming into the Greater New York area, is passed on in the chain from the fishermen who made the catch to the consumers who eat it. I believe that was Victor the security director mentioned in the tour description who accompanied us on the tour, but we were led by the manager of the market, on behalf of the company that runs it on lease from the city.

En route to Hunts Point we had been briefed on the history and operation of the food-oriented markets and other facilities occupying the city-owned Hunts Point campus by the alarmingly well-informed Julie from the NYC Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit org whose board is appointed by the mayor, and whose many functions include overseeing the Hunts Point operations, including the Produce Market (of which there will be an OHNY tour on May 28; see below), the cooperative-run Meat Market (which is very differently organized and not amenable to tour visitation), and the Baldor Specialty Foods facility (of which there will be an OHNY tour on June 10; see below), and a host of others.

The new Fulton Fish Market, we learned, was built to house 30 vendors from the old Fulton Street site, which was impossibly cramped, unhygienic, and without temperature controls or loading faciilities. Some 70 percent of those original vendors remain tenants; there has been steady turnover (and, yes, vacancies) in the rest of the space.


THE GAME PLAN FOR OHNY'S 201 SERIES "THE FINAL MILE"



The New Fulton Fish Market tour description I've put atop this post continues:

The Final Mile: Food Systems of New York is a year-long series of public programs, organized by Open House New York as part of its ongoing Urban Systems Series. The Final Mile is intended to shed light on New York City’s dynamic and multi-layered food economy while introducing and exploring approaches to render this invisible system more tangible.

The linked Final Mile page expands on this:

Why are we doing it?

In the age of superstorms, rapidly rising inequality, and global distribution systems, we are all increasingly aware of the connections between food, public health, and environmental stewardship. The Final Mile helps New Yorkers to better understand how food shapes the city in critical ways that all too often go unnoticed.

How can you participate?

The Final Mile will be comprised of a series of tours and events over the course of 2015. Tickets for individual programs will become available two weeks in advance. Watch the Schedule for updates and details as they become available, or subscribe to OHNY’s Mailing List. You can also follow our Blog to learn more about how the city’s food system operates.

THE SPRING SCHEDULE

The announced plan is:

Spring 2015: Industrial-Scaled Distribution in the Global City
Summer 2015: Uncovering the Remnants of Historic Food Systems
Late 2015: Exploring New Models for a Sustainable Future

Already scheduled are:

Lecture-discussion: How Great Cities Are Fed
Wednesday, April 29, 6:30pm
SVA Theatre, Chelsea, Manhattan

"A very special public talk and discussion to kick off The Final Mile," featuring Karen Karp ("New York-based food systems expert, president of Karp Resources") and Robert LaValva ("founder and president of the New Amsterdam Market").

Free for OHNY members, OHNY volunteers, and students; $10 for general admission. Registration in progress.

Tour: Hunts Point Produce Market
Thursday, May 28, 8am

A cooperative market through which 60% of the produce consumed in the New York Metropolitan Area passes every day. On this morning tour, you’ll walk one of the four massive “row” buildings, each a third of a mile long, then visit a variety of packaging plants within the facility. Afterwards, market manager Myra Gordon will lead a group discussion of the role that the produce market plays in the city’s food system.

Tickets go on sale at 10am on May 14.

Tour: Baldor Specialty Foods
Wednesday, June 10, time TBD

Tour the facility of Baldor, a major regional food distributor that started off as Balducci’s Fruit Stand in the Village in 1946, to better understand how private firms fit into the mix in the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. Explore the sprawling warehouse with food systems expert Johanna Kolodny, who works directly with suppliers to expand the company’s diverse offerings to the New York market. Participants will learn how the company keeps track of the thousands of varieties of fresh food on-site, and how they bring food from a thousand partners around the world to plates across the five boroughs.

Tickets go on sale at 10am on May 27.

For the tours, OHNY members are likely to get a discounted price, and registration as close as possible to the start of the on-sale time is advisable; my guess is that they'll fill up fast. For the other Hunts Point tours, as with today's Fulton Fish Market one, round-trip bus transportation is provided from OHNY's office at 1133 Broadway (at 26th Street).


MEANWHILE, OHNY IS IN THE THICK
OF ANOTHER NEW LONG-TERM PROJECT

It's called Monographs in Motion>, and it's a series of events "that highlights the work of firms that have had a significant impact on New York City's built environment through public tours of the firm's most exemplary projects." First up is the architectural firm FXFOWLE, and we've already toured the substantial renovation and major expansion of the Juilliard School at Lincoln center undertaken by the firm in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and a host of outside experts in a host of fields.

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Throwing in the towel on the 2014 campaign, and while we're at it the 2016 campaign as well

"I get 'The Temple will be rebuilt' and 'The Messiah
will come.' But what does 'Hillary will run' mean?"

by Ken

Just as I was about to make the official announcement that I'm officially sick of the 2014 election campaign, along comes The New Yorker's David Sipress, on his current stint as newyorker.com "Daily Cartoon"-ist, with the above cartoon, to remind me that I'm actually already officially sick of the 2016 election campaign. Is this what they mean by early voting?

In case you're wondering, the moment when I decided it was time to pull my personal plug on the 2014 hootenanny came Saturday evening while I was waiting in the Manhattan-side Staten Island Ferry Terminal for the ferry to take my to my Open House New York rendezvous with the designer and lighting designer of the great Staten Island "Postcards" 9/11 memorial. It turned out to be an utterly extraordinary event, and maybe we should talk about that sometime, but for now we're still back in the Manhattan terminal. I happened to glance up at the terminal's electronic crawl and realized I was seeing some sort of campaign ad for the Democrat-ish challenger to indicted GOP Congressman "Mikey Suits" Grimm. It was jarring because the crawl intermingles ferry news such as there occasionally is, like boarding announcements, with advertisements, and to an onlooker who happened to forget this delicate mixture it could appear as if the NYC Dept. of Transportation, which operates the Staten Island Ferry, was encouraging ferry riders to vote for Domenic Recchia.

As anyone who has been following Howie's coverage of this race knows all too well, the idea of voting for either of these slugs is enough to make a person wonder whether it isn't time to give up on this form of government we've devised here in the U.S.A. -- even granting the principle that anybody has to be a better choice than Mikey Suits. The principle seems sound enough, but it isn't entirely clear that Domenic Recchia crawls in under the heading of "anybody."

Speaking of the Suits-Recchia race, it breaks my heart to have to be the bearer of this news, but if you had your heart set on attending the Great Debate, "Recchia and Grimm's only live televised debate before an audience" (as the Staten Island Advance's political editor, Tom Wrobleski, put it in his silive.com post this afternoon), to be held October 28 at the New Springville campus of the College of Staten Island, well, here's the headline on the Wrobleski story: "One hot ticket: Ducats for televised Grimm/Recchia debate are all gone." The 430 tickets went up for grabs today and were almost immediately snapped up.

Luckily (I guess), you can still watch the Great Debate, courtesy of both cosponsors. Time Warner Cable channel NY1 will of course be televising it live, and it will be live-streamed both on NY1's website and on that of the Advance, the aforementioned silive.com. The debate is being moderated by NY1's estimable political anchor Errol Louis, and the panelists will be aforementioned Advance Political Editor Tom Wroblewski and NY1 political reporter Courtney Gross. It sounds like there will be more talent on the questioning than on the answering side. It remains to be seen, though, whether the questioners will enable viewers to grasp just how preposterous a choice they are being offered.

Of course around the country there are occasional candidates genuinely worthy of voters' attention -- obviously including the slate of Blue America '14 endorsees -- but more often than not they're treading water alongside way better-funded candidates from either the Establishment or the Right-Wing Freak Show political shop. And across the country 2014 political contests have devolved into freak shows in their own right. In which connection you might want to check out the washingtonpost.com "Fix" post by Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake, " The 9 most ridiculous campaigns of 2014," which the writer tells us he has arrived at by mulling over "the most ridiculous of the ridiculous" for a while.

You can check them our for yourself, but I'll clue you in that Aaron's choices are:

1. The Kentucky Senate race
2. The Texas governor's race
3. The Iowa Senate race
4. The Texas lieutenant governor/Senate GOP primaries (tie)
5. Louisiana's 5th district
6. The Illinois governor's race
7. The Mississippi Senate race
8. The Pennsylvania governor's race

And yes, apparently just making the cut --

9. New York's 11th district

That's Suits vs. Recchia.

The biggest choice I'll face on my ballot is whether or not to vote to reelect Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It's hard to think of any good reason to vote for him, and it doesn't look as if there's going to be any need to vote against his opponent, certifiable idiot Rob Astorino. In case there was any anxiety that the idiot Rob might somehow slip through the electoral machinery, surely the nail in his gubernatorial coffin has been sealed by the ringing endorsement, in the form of a blistering attack on the governor, by some guy named Willard Romney. About all you can say to somebody like this Willard guy is, "It takes one to know one."

My guess is that hardly anyone in NYS has any idea who the idiot Rob is, and that includes the hard-core voters who will cast their vote for whatever Republican is put up. "Whatever Republican is put up" seems like the best description available for the idiot Rob.

Which means that the result on Election Day may be closer than anyone would dare to forecast, and a lot closer than the governor would wish. Which seems to me the best result we can hope for. Voting for the guy will just give him ideas.

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Urban Gadabout: Last call for Open House New York Weekend (October 11-12)

Part of Prospect Park's restored Lakeside: The two Lakeside tours are booked up, but reservations aren't required for an OHNY visit to Lakeside. The list of no-registration events is here.

by Ken

I realize that a last call for Open House New York Weekend, which takes place tomorrow and Sunday, isn't likely to be of great interest to non-New Yorkers. It should be of paramount interest to New Yorkers, though, and I think others might, if only in the service of curiosity about the world around us, want to at least glance through the roughly a zillion listings on offer. (The event listing, sortable using all kinds of filters, is here.) EVen if you can't get to any of the events, the listing seems to me a fascinating guidepost to a way we've arrived at of looking at our physical past, present, and future.

And practically speaking, if it's too late for you for this year, there are way foolhardier things you could do than pencil in a descent on Gotham for next year. (Figuring on the second weekend in October, I would be looking at Oct. 10-11, 2015. The dates are actually announced well in advance. It's the list of events that's kept under wraps until practically game time.)

As for those who are within striking distance of the city, you still have hundreds if not thousands of events and sites available. It's true that the events that required registration were gobbled up by some 7500 of us, according to OHNY, beginning the instant that online reservations began on October 1. The thing to stress, however, is that most OHNY Weekedn events don't require registration, which you can simply drop in on tomorrow and Sunday. And the fact that they don't require preregistration doesn't make them any less interesting than the events that do.

By way of illustration of just how subjective the appeal of the multitude of attractions assembled by OHNY is, I offer my own experience of "reservation day." Last year I didn't even bother participating in the mad scramble. I always say I never expect to get higher than my fifth or sixth choices. Howver, I also say that, fortunately, my fifth and sixth choice are still terrific things to see and do. In fact, there are usually a couple of hundred things I'd be happy to do.

But this year I decided to give the opening-bell insanity a shot. I had prepared my wish list as best I could. I was online at the start of registration, and while I never even saw many of the events I'd noted on the list of things to click, and others when clicked turned out to be sold out, I did spot a number of "my" items, and by the time I scraped myself off my chair I had bagged five, four for Saturday and one for Sunday, and they're all things I'm really happy to be doing. Not content to let well enough, though, I checked back occasionally on some of the things I'd signed up for, expecting to find them booked up (wouldn't that have felt good?), and found that only one was. In fact, that night I checked all of "my" events -- and found that at the end of the day four of them were still bookable!

So tomorrow morning at 10am I'm due at the Lakeside development on the southern end of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, where I haven't been since two Octobers ago, when I did a pair of tours as part of the Cultural Landscape Foundation's What's Out There Weekend in New York (the same weekend as OHNY!) with Christian Zimmerman, the park's chief landscape architect. First was a tour of the park's legendary Long Meadow and the contiguous Ravine, where Christian and his team had done some amazing restorations and rebuilds. Then came a tour of a massive project he was overseeing, the largest construction project in the park since it was built: a complete rebuild of its southern end to restore much of it to something close to the majestic and functional original design of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, which through decades of abusive misconstruction had been transformed into a travesty.

This involved reconstructing the whole southern end of the Lake, and a lot of the northern end as well, and around the Lake and in the nearby areas reinstalling many original features that had been found and re-creating most of the others that had been "disappeared." Tha part of the park was then within days of reopening, but there was an even more impressive venture afoot: the construction of a whole new multi-use facility, cunningly designed into the landscape of the park and incorporating two skating rinks, a water feature, a raft of amenities including rest rooms and paths for runners, and goodness knows what else. (You can read about Lakeside Brooklyn, as the entire "26 acre multi-purpose recreational destination" is known, at the link.) Christian showed us all around the building as it existed then, in an advanced state of construction but still more than a year from completion. The LeFrak Center, as it would be called, finally opened in December 2013, but I haven't been back to Lakeside since October 2012.

Tomorrow, I gather, the architects of the new building will be joining Christian as he shows us the whole completed Lakeside section of the park. I was thrilled that I was able to book the Lakeside tour, and figure it must surely be one of the prizes among the OHNY offerings. But no, it was one of my four "catches" that could still be had for the registering that night.

By the way, although the tour was booked up in advance, Lakeside itself is very much on the OHNY "available" list, both Saturday and Sunday, 10am-6pm:

Lakeside is the largest and most ambitious project in Prospect Park since the Park's completion nearly 150 years ago. Spanning 26 acres, this $74 million restoration by the Prospect Park Alliance honors the original design while transforming an underutilized section of the Park into a popular scenic and recreational destination. Lakeside features the Chaim Baier Music Island and Shelby White and Leon Levy Esplanade, and the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Center, which provides the public with seasonal  ice skating, roller skating, water play, and boat and bike rentals; a year-round cafe and restrooms; beautifully landscaped viewing terraces.

From Prospect Park tomorrow I head to Hunter's Point, Queens, and while the easiest way to make the trip, as in the case of most mass-transit connections between next-door Brooklyn and Queens, is via Manhattan, I've figured out a route that, in the spirit of Open House New York, involves a quick subway trip to Downtown Brooklyn to catch the B62 bus, which eventually crosses the Pulaski Bridge over Newtown Creek into Long Island City, Queens. Then for me it's back to Manhattan, via the No. 7 and No. 6 trains, to the Eleanor Roosevelt House at Hunter College, and finally downtown to the Staten Island Ferry to catch the evening program devoted to the lighting plan of the extraordinary "Postcards" 9/11 memorial, which I've seen a number of times, but never at night. Sunday morning I'll be at the eastern end of 96th Street in Manhattan, on the Esplanade, for a look at "A New Edge for the East River Esplanade." After that, assuming I'm up to it, I've been looking at hundreds of non-registration things I could still do the rest of the day.


"A New Edge for the East River Esplanade": The Saturday and Sunday OHNY tours are sold out, but if you read the tour description, nothing stops you from visiting the site yourself.


SPEAKING OF OHNY

It's one of NYC's great organizations, worthy of any support anyone might wish to offer. The most self-interested way to support OHNY is by becoming a member, which not only helps the organization financially but sets you up for all sorts of member benefits. As usual with these things there are various levels of membership, but even the basic one gets you notice of all sorts of events scheduled by OHNY throughout the year, some for members only, others offered at a member-discount price. I've had such a grand time in my first year of membership that I'm almost looking forward to renewing. For all information turn to the website, which is the impossible-to-forget ohny.org.

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Urban Gadabout:The schedule for OHNY Weekend (Oct. 11-12) is out today, and registration begins tomorrow!

"Overview" from the Open House New York website: "For two days every October, OHNY Weekend unlocks the doors to New York’s most important buildings, offering an extraordinary opportunity to experience the city and meet the people who design, build, and preserve New York. From historic to contemporary, residential to industrial, hundreds of sites across the five boroughs are open to visit, with tours, talks, performances and other special events taking place over the course of the Weekend. Through the unparalleled access that it enables, OHNY Weekend deepens our understanding of the importance of architecture and urban design to foster a more vibrant civic life and helps catalyze a citywide conversation about how to build a better New York."

by Ken

I think I did post the crucial dates: schedule for Open House New York 2014 available to the general public on September 30, with registration for events that require registration (lots don't, but lots do) starting the next day, October 1, at 11am. I suppose I should have provided a reminder as those dates approached. Well, here's a reminder.

The full schedule for what I think can safely be called the most exciting weekend in the annual New York City calendar is now posted online, and New Yorkers can pick up copies at designated locales, in preparation for tomorrow's craziness. Rest assured that even once the most sought-after events are booked up, there will still be roughly a zillion options open for those two days, Saturday and Sunday, October 11-12. Note that this year for the first time there are evening programs both days: tours of the lighting systems of storied structures around the city (all requiring advance registration).

Here's what OHNY sent out this morning to the mailing list:

Today is the big day! As of this morning, the Event Guide for the 12th Annual OHNY Weekend is officially available to the public. Click here to download a digital copy right now via We Transfer; stop by one of our distribution hubs around the city to pick up a printed guide; or get a copy of this week's issue of Time Out New York where the Event Guide is a special insert. 

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

Listings for the hundreds of sites and tours offered during this year's OHNY Weekend are now live at ohny.org. Web listings include full site descriptions, as well as all of the vital info for sites and tours, like dates and open hours for Open Access Sites, and times for Advanced Reservation tours. Read below for information on Advance Reservations, which begin at 11 am on Wednesday, Oct 1.

As an OHNY member I had a peek at at least part of the schedule; even we members, though, didn't get to see schedule information for the events that require advance registration, which made it kind of hard to "plan." For help in sorting through the truly mind-blowing range of options, you can view the list applying all sorts of filters -- for borough, kinds of events, etc., etc., etc. None of them happen to correspond to my interests, and so this morning I started plowing through the alphabetical list, and when I came up for air I was still in the "F"s.

Frankly, as of the time of writing, I still haven't figured out my "strategy" for tomorrow. So far I've encountered an alarming number of events that sound terrific, and get us into places that aren't likely to be publicly accessible most of the year, but (luckily, perhaps!) I don't think I've stumbled across any of the kind that make me think, "If I can't do that, I'll die."

So don't panic. If you want to just take your time working your way through the materials, there will still be all sorts of fascinating things you can see, many of them presented by people who played or play a crucial role in their creation or operation. See you on October 11!

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Urban Gadabout: Curiosity (Plus news from OHNY, MAS, the NY Transit Museum, and Jack Eichenbaum, including another trek on the No. 7 train)

On Saturday, September 6, Norman Oder leads the MAS walking tour "Long Island City, Queens in Flux: Court Square and Hunters Point." I've done at least six or seven tours with Norman now, and they've all been tremendously rewarding.

by Ken

If you look among the newly announced September, October, and November walking-tour offerings of the Municipal Art Society at the description of Francis's Morrone's September 28 tour, "Then and Now: Jane Jacobs and the West Village," you'll see that it --

looks at the life and work of Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities so sharply and logically articulated many people's inchoate misgivings about the city rebuilding of the preceding decade and the orthodox notions of city planners. (The book, not least a literary masterpiece, is highly recommended reading for this tour.)

I think the tour should be pretty much self-recommending. I've already registered. (And contrary to the incessant complaints about certain MAS tours, like Francis's, being impossible to book, the fact is that if you take the trouble to look at the schedule early in the registration period, they're all available.) In addition, since I'm embarrassed to say that I have never in fact read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I've ordered myself a copy of the 50th Anniversary Edition.

Which I bring up because of that phrase Francis uses in the description: "highly recommended reading for this tour." This is a stepped-back version of a formulation Francis experimented with awhile back, which again I'm embarrassed to say I flunked on my very first opportunity. It was a tour, naturally down in the Old Seaport region of Lower Manhattan, devoted to Herman Melville's and Joseph Mitchell's New York, and I must have decided to register for the tour without properly reading the description, which contained a notice that two pieces of the legendary New York-centric New Yorker writer, at least the opening section of "Old Mr. Flood" and the story "Up in the Old Hotel," both of which bear directly on what we now think of as the South Street Seaport area.

Francis mentions Joseph Mitchell pieces frequently on his walks, for the obvious reason that Mitchell explored New York City the old-fashioned shoe-leather way, and listened to the people he met -- in places that fancy writers rarely venture to -- for a sense of who they were, who they had been (and where they had come from), and who and what they wanted to be.

Not long afterward, while doing another walk with Francis (Greenpoint and Williamsburg open spaces, as I recall), I confessed my guilt but told him I had been doing my remedial Joseph Mitchell reading and brandished my copy of the lovely immense Mitchell anthology -- four books in one! -- whose name was taken from none other than Up in the Old Hotel. Which prompted a story from Francis. I've never seen anything yet that didn't prompt a story from Francis.

He mentioned that for his upcoming tour of Brooklyn's Boerum Hill neighborhood, which has seen barely imaginable gentrification since the '70s, he had included more required reading in the description which had simply vanished from the published version. A couple of us who were registered for the Boerum Hill tour asked what that was. It was, he told us, two Joseph Mitchell pieces, "The Mohawks in High Steel" (from 1949, when the neighborhood included a packed enclave of those Native American daredevil ironworkers from upstate New York, whose union had its headquarters on Atlantic Avenue, on the northern edge of the district), and -- are you ready for it? -- "Up in the Old Hotel," plus a novel by Jonathan Lethem.

We'll come back to the Lethem novel in a moment, but having just read "Up in the Old Hotel," which deals primarily with the proprietor of a humble South Street eatery that, much against his will, had come to be called Sloppy Louie's, I puzzled initially at the Brooklyn connection. And then I remembered Louie's story of the restaurant in Brooklyn where he had learned the business as a waiter, and been drawn into the social history of the city.

As to the Lethem novel, I had to trust to memory, despite the enormous risk of trusting to my memory these days, since that day I wasn't carrying anything to write with. So imagine my chagrin when, back at the computer, I discovered that Lethem, whom I'd never read, is a Brooklyn boy, and the novel in question could have been either of his early novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999) or The Fortress of Solitude (2003). I figured it wouldn't kill me to read both, and naturally -- since this is the way my mind works -- I attacked them in chronological order

I loved Motherless Brooklyn, a grisly story told from the perspective of a grunge-level detective who suffers from Torrrete's syndrome, which is built into the fabric of the book and the way the story unfolds. But I had a feeling it wasn't "the" book, since the office out of which the narrator worked was in the sort of no man's land between Boerum Hill and adjoining Cobble Hill. It's a sensational book, though, and I was delighted to have been led to it, however accidentally. The result, though, was that by the time the tour came round, I was only about two-thirds of the way through Fortress of Solitude, which does in fact deal directly with Boerum Hill pre-, mid-, and post-gentrification.

(And the Francis story about Jonathan Lethem? When a German TV company was doing a piece on Brooklyn, they choose as their experts on the subject -- Jonathan Lethem and Francis Morrone! And I gather they've kept in touch.)

Do I have to tell you how much those readings enhanced my sense of what we saw on that Boerum Hill walk? Because the tour description hadn't included the "required reading," Francis took the time, while we were standing opposite the site where the restaurant Louie had worked in once was, to read a passage from "Up in the Old Hotel," which gave a sense of what the location and the people had meant to Louie while he worked there and took his lunch breaks in the area.

Later still, when Francis scheduled his Cobble Hill walking tour, he included as required reading a novel whose name and author I've forgotten, but which I bought and read, even though while I was deciding whether to do that walk again (I had found the Cobble Hill tour one of my most enjoyable with Francis, but as a result I thought maybe I remembered it too well for the time being), it sold out! So I wound up doing the required reading without doing the tour -- but it was a remarkable book, and not just an on-point Brooklyn book, with a chillingly icy slant on our supposedly closest relationships. (I'll think of the name.)

On a tour not long ago, I finally asked Francis what had happened to those reading assignments. The problem, he said, was that nobody was reading them. He reflected a moment, then said he should probably get back to that.

And he should. I've come to understand that it isn't so much the tour leaders' knowledge that I'm looking for on these tours, although the good ones are overflowing with it. It's their curiosity I treasure -- the curiosity that has driven them to acquire the knowledge they've acquired and the ways they've found to satisfy and further stimulate it. They're very different people, people like Francis and Matt Postal and Justin Ferate and Jack Eichenbaum and James Nevius, but in the few years I've been doing this, I've tried to walk in the path of their curiosity -- and learned more than I could have imagined on my own about the world around me.


AUTUMN IN NEW YORK

It's the time of year when everyone is announcing fall plans.

Before we get to actually announced plans, I should mention that the 12th Annual Open House New York Weekend is scheduled for October 11-12. "More than 300 sites and tours. 75,000 visitors," the Facebook page says. The website says:

Celebrating the city’s architecture and design, the 12th Annual Open House New York Weekend will once again unlock the city, allowing New Yorkers and tourists alike access to hundreds of sites, talks, tours, performances and family activities in neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. From private residences and historic landmarks, to hard hat tours and sustainable skyscrapers, OHNY gives you rare access into the extraordinary architecture of New York City, while introducing you to the people who make the city a vibrant and sustainable place to live, work, and play.

Please note: Sites and tours for the 2014 Open House New York Weekend will be announced in early October. Be sure to check back in October for the 2014 list or follow us on Facebook or Twitter for updates.

MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY

As I mentioned up top, the September-November MAS schedule is posted now (or you can just go to mas.org and click on "Tours"). I have it on the authority of a source whose judgment I respect immoderately that this is the best MAS schedule he's ever seen. That's not quite my response, but then, that's just me. No doubt you'll find an enormous range of offerings covering a large chunk of NYC. And the last time I looked, every one of them was still available for registration.


NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM

The fall schedule of programs and off-site tours is here. As always, there's a two-day pre-registration period exclusively for NYTM members, on August 20-21, beginning at 9am, with registration thrown open to all on August 22.

Remember that two popular tours are open only to members:

• The visit to the long-abandoned, ornate old City Hall subway station ("The Jewel in the Crown: Old City Hall Station," offered at 1:30pm and 3:30 pm on Sunday, October 12)

• And a walk through the old subterranean space, now contemplated as a possible underground version of the High Line, that once housed a busy trolley terminal leading out onto the Williamsburg Bridge ("Trolley Ghosts: The Terminal Under Delancey," offered at 6:30pm on two Thursday evenings, October 23 and November 6).

Yes, you can register in time to use the early-registration period. For membership information, check here.

Among the tours open to all are:

• An evening fall Nostalgia Ride, for Halloween season, to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx

• A look at the Flushing Meadows site of the 1939 and 1964-65 World's Fairs considered from the standpoint of their transit options, with the always-interesting Andrew Sparberger, whose Transit Museum offerings I try never to miss (Sunday, October 19, 1pm, or Saturday, November 15, 2pm). Note: Andy will also be doing a free program at the museum on Wednesday evening, December 10, 6:30-7:30pm, in connection with the publication of his new book, From a Nickel to a Token ("a microhistory of New York's transit system," which "examines twenty specific events between 1940 and 1968, book-ended by subway unification and the creation of the MTA").

• A "behind the scenes" visit to the Bergen Sign Shop, "New York City Transit's only locale for sign production (Saturday, October 18, or Sunday, December 6, at 10am or 12n either day)

• A Staten Island bicycle tour, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Verrazanno Narrows Bridge, from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal to Fort Wadsworth and the anchorage of the bridge, with a stop-off at the Alice Austen House (Saturday, September 13, 11am-3pm)

• "Power Play: Steampunk and the Transit System," an after-hours event at the museum on Thursday, October 2, 7-9pm, held in conjunction with Atlas Obscura, in which "we examine the marvel of engineering that transformed the city from steam to electric at the dawn of the twentieth century"

Among the mostly free (but reservations recommended) programs at the museum are:

• A "Bus Bonanza!" clustered around NYTM's 21st Annual Bus Festival (Sunday, September 28), held in conjunction with the always-lively Atlantic Antic on nearby Atlantic Avenue, 12n-6pm, celebrating its 40th anniversary, and including $1 museum admission

• "The MTA's Next Big Thing: Fulton Center" (Wednesday, October 29, 6:30pm; $10, $5 to NYTM members)

And several conversations with authors of bound-to-be-interesting new books:

• With former MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch (Thursday, October 9, 7pm), author of So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises

• With power super-whiz Joe Cunningham (another longtime NYTM tour favorite, Wednesday, October 15, 6:30pm), author of New York Power

• As mentioned above, with Andy Sparberger (Wednesday, December 10, 6:30pm), author of From a Nickel to a Token

Again, for the full list of events scheduled, check the NYTM "Calendar of Events" page.


JACK EICHENBAUM IS DOING HIS "SIGNATURE
TOUR," "THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN," AGAIN

I've written about Jack's "World of the #7 Train" a bunch of times, and was signed up to do it again on May 31, when disaster, aka New York City Transit, struck, with a last-minute announcement of the shutdown of the western half of the No. 7 line for that date. Jack was able to reschedule the outing for June, but I wasn't able to do the makeup date. I've already sent in my check for September 20!

THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN
Saturday, September 20, 10am-5:30pm

This series of six walks and connecting rides along North Queens’ transportation corridor is my signature tour. We focus on what the #7 train has done to and for surrounding neighborhoods since it began service in 1914. Walks take place in Long Island City, Sunnyside, Flushing, Corona, Woodside and Jackson Heights and lunch is in Flushing with a great variety of Asian restaurants. Tour fee is $40 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address)

The full day’s program and other info is available by email jaconet@aol.com

The tour is limited to 25 people.

You can keep up to date on Jack's event plans on his website -- where you can also sign up for e-updates. The tour-info page is here. For his upcoming MAS tours, you'll be directed back to the MAS site for registration information. To bring this full circle, I've mentioned that Jack was the person who turned me on to MAS, when I took his "Three Transit Hubs" for NYTM!

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