Sunday Times!
Nov. 13th, 2005 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On taking pictures in NYC. Guess all those tourists are screwed....
On Location in the Homeland
By DEREN GETZ as told to JAIMIE EPSTEIN
Do you remember that restaurant scene in "Quiz Show," where John Turturro is told to take the dive? It took me weeks to find that place. And it wasn't even a restaurant. It was the old Grolier Club, between Madison and Park - you've got to think creatively. That's my job. That's what a location scout does. The director gives me a script or a storyboard, and I search for the settings that will make his vision happen. I've been in the business for 25 years, done production work, been a location scout since 1991. The job's still the same as it was, but since 9/11, the game has changed a bit.
For example, it used to be that you could just poke around buildings, walk in, punch a button in the elevator, get out on any floor. You could get onto any roof. I remember one time I was climbing up a stanchion at Rockefeller Center to get a clear shot of Fifth Avenue for a commercial when this security guard tries to stop me. I tell him that it's a public space, I have every right to be there, to go get a cop if he wants to. By the time he comes back with a cop, I've taken my picture. I know the rules.
Of course, security is much tighter now. The bridges are basically off limits, and sensitive areas are even more sensitive. And I guess since the Patriot Act, just taking pictures on the street, which is what I do a lot of, might be interpreted as surveillance and therefore might seem suspicious.
A year or two ago, I was scouting for NBC's fall promos in Midtown near Grand Central and the Chrysler Building. I get paid by the day, so I have to work fast: I walk up and down the street I have in mind, and I shoot semi-panoramic, clicking every 30 or 45 degrees - I get the whole block in, like, three shots, and move on. Anyway, I shoot for maybe three minutes and I'm done, when building-security guys stop me and ask what I am doing. I tell them, but they want my ID. Figuring that it will be quicker to make the guys happy than to tell them they are out of bounds, I give it to them. I don't remember if I had a scouting permit. I often don't because permits are hard to get, not because of 9/11 but because they were being abused, so I tend not to bother. The supervisor takes my ID upstairs and comes back 10 minutes later with it, and I figure that's it.
About two weeks later, I was meeting with the folks who were shooting the NBC promos. We're at the Noho Star having lunch, when I get a call from the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
They want to know where I am. I tell them. They want to know if they can stop by. I say, Sure, if you're here in a half-hour, because we've already ordered. Fifteen minutes later, like in a scene in a movie, an unmarked Taurus pulls up outside and in walk these two guys. I get up to meet them and take them back to the table and introduce them around. One's wearing an ill-fitting suit, and he looks like Dennis Franz from "NYPD Blue" - I think he had a mustache but maybe not. The other one looks like a surfer dude - he's got blond hair and is wearing a pink polo shirt. I say to them, "You look like a cop, but you look like a movie star." I was putting it on a bit for my clients, giving them a good show.
So they're regular guys, but they do the cop thing, ask if I mind stepping away from the table, and as I do, the NBC folks joke, "He's not with us!" The agents and I walk to a table at the back of the restaurant. They want to know why I was taking pictures in Midtown. (How was I supposed to know that part of some government agency had moved near Grand Central?)
I tell them I was scouting locations, and I ask if they want to see the photos; I've got my computer with me. So I boot it up and show them the block they were interested in and some other blocks. They end up thanking me for my time and leaving their cards.
I didn't take it very seriously. I mean, it took them two weeks to follow up, so how important a lead could I have been? It seemed funny at the time. It was surreal. But I told our local association about it - it's called Alsam (the Association of Location Scouts and Managers) - and found out that other scouts had complained as well. And not long after that, some of our members met with the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting. So now the Port Authority, different agencies, area police departments, they all have our names - every agency except Homeland Security, for some reason. And we have laminated ID's with photos: totally legit.
It makes me laugh when I think that in the old days, a buddy and I made fake ID tags when we were scouting for "Law and Order." If someone got belligerent with us, we'd flash them. They were a joke: we just took pictures of each other and cut them out and pasted them onto card stock - totally homemade. They looked pretty good, I guess, but they'd never work now.
On the East Village
It's got a slide show!
From Grit to Gloss
By RICHARD PEREZ
The other day, as I stood on the corner of Astor Place and Lafayette Street, two adorable young Japanese tourists stopped to ask me a question: "Can you tell us where is the East Village?"
I was tempted to say, "The East Village is a state of mind, not a place." But these two young women were obviously demanding more concrete directions. Trying to be helpful, I pointed east.
"Over there," I said, almost adding, "Past the luxury high-rise." As they glanced toward where I was pointing, then back at me, I could almost see the disappointment in their eyes.
Afterward, it occurred to me that I should have said something more, perhaps made mention of the raw pre-Starbucks days, recalled historical facts and luminaries who have since died, provided a brief historic explanation of how the notion and myth of bohemia took root in the West Village and spread east to Alphabet City in the 1960's as part of a brilliant P.R. move by visionary real estate brokers. But it was too late: The young women had straggled off and vanished in the crowd of confused Saturday shoppers, curiosity seekers and aimless slackers like me.
Still, their question continued to bother me, particularly as I looked up from where I stood at the Astor Place tower, the 21-story glass-and-steel condominium that opened last month on what had been a parking lot in front of which, in the late 80's, I used to hawk used hipster lit. My wares were mostly transgressive trade paperbacks, and my customers the kindred 20- and 30-something semi-intellectual would-be author/artists who then populated the neighborhood.
"Architectural Lofts for Sale, From $3.4 Million," proclaimed a large sign on the new tower. Another sign bore the words "Sculpture for Living," suggesting that people who bought into this building weren't simply buying real estate, they were buying "art." This promise presumably had something to do with the aura surrounding the area, the mythical East Village of yore, once the center of the art world and, during the early and mid-80's, home to more than 50 storefront galleries, all now vanished.
The young women's question came to mind again as I gazed at the giant bank of posters advertising the film version of "Rent," the scruffy Off Broadway rock musical about squatters in the age of AIDS. It was born and set on these very streets, then quickly moved to Broadway before making its way to the big screen, where it will open Nov. 23. "No day but today!" the posters proclaimed in stylized, fist-pumping glory as they marched along the scaffolding that stretched from the Astor Place Theater and seemed to wrap around the entire block. "No day but today!"
Another memorable lyric from the musical is "Bohemia, Bohemia's a fallacy in your head ... Bohemia is dead!" sung by the show's convert to capitalism, Benjamin Coffin III.
My thoughts exactly, I said to myself as I looked around the neighborhood and felt like a stranger.
No Day but Yesterday
The commercialization of the East Village began long before "Rent" opened in the tiny (150-seat) New York Theater Workshop in February 1996; even during the previous seven years in which its creator, Jonathan Larson, was shaping the show, the neighborhood he described so vividly had begun to disappear. But the earliest and latest versions of the rock musical serve as almost perfect bookends for the neighborhood's increasingly commercialized transformation during the period they bracketed.
When "Rent" arrived at the New York Theater Workshop, much was made of how the world brought to life inside the playhouse was mirrored on the streets just outside. "One of the nicest things about seeing 'Rent' on East Fourth Street," Margo Jefferson, a critic for The New York Times, wrote shortly after the opening, "is that when you leave (Cafe La Mama is right across the street), you feel a genuine link between theater and life."
"Rent" accurately portrayed a neighborhood populated by transgender, gay and multicultural characters, and its subject matter dealt head on with issues related to a community in swift transition: gentrification, displacement, homelessness, AIDS, drug addiction, community activism and homesteading, a k a squatting. The musical also touched on issues that related to me personally as a would-be-artist/loser: hanging on to your ideals and your creative integrity in light of ever more insidious commercial expectations, the absence of low-cost housing and the absence of health insurance, especially in the time of AIDS.
But to look back at the world from which "Rent" emerged, and to contrast it with the world in which the movie will open, is to look at a chasm. When it comes to the issues that were front and center in the little musical - AIDS, drugs, housing, poverty - practically everything has changed.
Epidemic? What Epidemic?
When I think about "Rent" and about another theatrical classic of the era, "Angels in America," I often wonder, "What happened to the issue of AIDS?"
Was the subject displaced in the news media by the seemingly more urgent threat of terrorism? Or does the presence of new drugs that can prolong life make this illness less of a public issue, despite the fact that nearly a million Americans have been mortally afflicted, more than 500,000 have died, and according to Avert, an international AIDS charity, an estimated 40,000 new HIV infections occur in America each year?
In "Rent," no fewer than four major characters are infected with the disease: Tom Collins, the anarchist turned New York University instructor; Angel, the transvestite street drummer; Roger, the aspiring punk songwriter; and Mimi, the dancer in an S-and-M club whom he loves. The script has references to AZT breaks and Life Support meetings, and the specter of the disease hangs over much of the musical, like a dark cloud waiting to unleash its misery. When the characters sing "No day but today," the words ring in many ears as a cry of desperation.
In real life, the stigma of the disease was so great by the mid-90's that most people kept it secret, even with the first signs of emaciation and the lesions that were a telltale sign of Kaposi's sarcoma, a skin cancer linked with AIDS. Only drug addicts who hung out along the Bowery and in the fringes of Alphabet City were unable to conceal, or were beyond concealing, the ravages of the disease.
At restaurants where I sometimes worked, rumors floated and people dropped out of sight. When people failed to show up for shifts, for days on end, there was true cause for alarm.
Today, subway kiosks are plastered with posters that depict young men and women with glowing expressions and affirm the life-giving properties of the new AIDS cocktails. These days, to mention the disease in a trendy Avenue A martini bar is to attract the kind of looks you might get if you mentioned TB. Especially among a younger crowd, they have no clue what you're talking about.
In Recovery
Another hot-button topic in the East Village in those days was addiction. Whether crack cocaine (in the 80's) or heroin (in the 90's) or alcohol (always), drugs have played an important part in bohemia, both as self-medication and as buffer against the disappointments one faces when pursuing the creative life. In "Rent," two main characters are afflicted: Roger is in recovery, and Mimi, as she confesses in the haunting song "Light My Candle," still likes to "feel good" now and then.
During the 90's, as crack cocaine gave way to the cheaper and more refined heroin, it was impossible to walk more than two blocks in the Lower East Side without being accosted by seemingly ordinary individuals hawking items with names like "Pachunga," "Benny Blanco" and the ever popular "Hellraiser." There followed an avalanche of new and reissued books, like Linda Yablonsky's "Story of Junk," which involved heroin addiction followed by spiritual redemption.
Now and then, in a throwback to the crack cocaine days, shivering addicts could be seen in the twilight, waiting to hoist a bucket up the side of a dilapidated tenement building: first the money floated up, then the scag dropped.
Snort it, smoke it or shoot it up; for a time, heroin seemed part of the local landscape: as you looked north from the Bowery, the Empire State Building loomed like a huge, hot syringe.
Now, of course, the whole scene has changed. Former addicts are "maintaining" or dead. Whispered offers of "double-sealed works" are no longer heard in the neighborhood, nor is it common to see someone tie off between parked cars or at the foot of shadowy basement stairs or in the bathroom of Tompkins Square Park. Former addicts and even dabblers have gone the way of the Bowery bum; I haven't heard the drug mentioned seriously for years.
Changing the Locks
"Everything is rent!" sing the characters in the musical's anthem title song. And today, even more than in the 90's, many New Yorkers find themselves deeply troubled by the growing lack of affordable housing in the area. The Real Estate Board of New York, commenting this year on sales of condominiums south of 14th Street, noted that "prewar condos surged to a median price of $1.275 million." For the first time since the organization started tracking prices over all, median sale prices for condominiums downtown, the group noted, "have been higher than both the Upper East Side and West Side."
At a moment when living expenses in the neighborhood are stratospheric, I often ask myself: Who can still afford a place to sleep in its precincts, let alone risk taking the artist's path? Or, as The Real Deal, a magazine that tracks New York real estate, put it: "The gentrification sweeping Astor Place, a bridge area that was once the inviolate dividing line between the East Village and Greenwich Village in the late 1970's, now means condominium conversions are driving out the urban grit."
In my eyes, the Astor Place tower is the most potent symbol of the absence of urban grit. The developer is the Related Companies, which helped to develop the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. The architects, Gwathmey Siegel, have created buildings for celebrated figures like Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, coincidentally one of the earliest supporters of "Rent" and the first to arrange for the musical's cast recording.
Does the mirrored glass tower, hard by the historic Cooper Union brownstone and the landmark Public Theater, look wildly out of place? Or is it just me?
Well-Scrubbed Sidewalks
The original production of "Rent" was not only set in the East Village, it was performed there as well, and visually, the show perfectly jived with the area's grunginess and romanticized seediness; the set resembled a thrift-store patchwork quilt of the neighborhood, filled with the ragtag clutter of downtown.
That ragtag clutter, characterized by posted fliers, Xerox art/collage and graffiti art on St. Marks Place and elsewhere, was an important part of the raw aesthetic of the place. Most of the shining lights of the East Village art scene - Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer - had begun their careers as graffiti artists. Street posters and the stylized, expressionistic scrawls across a wide range of surfaces were more than an advertising tool; they were a kind of subversive art.
These days, as the neighborhood seeks to make itself ever more attractive to high-end businesses and developers of luxury housing, that kind of expression is strictly contained. Cleanup squads are assigned the task of removing pesky signs of local color, and virtually every light pole and the rare boarded-up storefront are routinely scraped of anarchic artwork and local political announcements or manifestos. Anyone caught posting handmade fliers can be charged with a "quality of life" infraction. Seediness is no longer to be relished.
And what of the local landmarks that defined this neighborhood? One by one, I see them tumbling down.
Variety Photo Plays, the neon-lit theater in front of which Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle parked in "Taxi Driver," was recently demolished. The Polish diner on First Avenue that was the site of a famous breakfast scene between Jodie Foster and Mr. De Niro is also gone, as is the building on 13th Street where the shootout near the end of the film took place.
Disappeared, too, is the complex of neo-Federalist houses at 23 St. Marks Place that served a trio of culturally significant uses; it was the home of the Dom, where Andy Warhol created the Exploding Plastic Inevitable; it was where the Velvet Underground first performed; and it was home to the Electric Circus. In recent years, the complex served as a drug-treatment and community center; the space has been replaced by condos.
Nearby, at 15 St. Marks Place, stood a nondescript two-story building that housed a bar frequented by Allen Ginsberg and other Beats, one that dated to the pre-Stonewall days, when, by order of the State Liquor Authority, it was illegal to serve alcohol to homosexuals. That space, too, has been replaced by condos.
And CBGB, the temple of punk? Stay tuned. The club is embroiled in a messy dispute involving money and is hanging on by its fingernails.
On the Bowery, where I used to see staggering derelicts of all stripes, I now see freakishly upscale restaurants and million-dollar lofts. And coming soon - amid the restaurant supply stores and commercial businesses between Stanton and Rivington Streets - is the 60,000-square-foot, seven-story building for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, for which ground was broken Oct. 11.
Space 2B, at Second Street and Avenue B, could have served as a set for "Rent." The building, also known as the Gas Station, was a scrap-metal sculpture garden and industrial, avant-garde performance space that played host to some the area's wildest bands and performance art. In March 1996, a month after "Rent" moved to Broadway, the outdoor art was bulldozed, and the performance space was replaced by a Duane Reade and luxury apartments.
The Palladium, the famous dance club on 14th Street, was bought in 1997 by New York University and replaced by a high-rise dorm.
That brings me back to Astor Square. The last time I sold my books on the sidewalk, on Thanksgiving 1989, my small inventory was confiscated by the police when I misguidedly included samples of my hand-drawn art. (At the time, books and printed matter were protected as freedom of speech; art was not.)
A few weeks later, I moved my wares down to St. Marks Place, in front of the old Deutsch-Amerikanische building, site of the old St. Mark's Bookshop. In my youthful, earnest folly, I was selling a self-published book of poetry, "Idealism and Early-Wishfillment," which despite my modesty in printing 2,000 copies proved to be an immediate flop.
Not long after that, booksellers who had been protected by the First Amendment found themselves the subject of new municipal restrictions on where and when they could set up shop, and thus, under the guise of public safety, were essentially barred from the streets.
On the integration of the NYC transit system, predating Rosa Parks by almost exactly 100 years
The Schoolteacher on the Streetcar
By KATHARINE GREIDER
AS the civil rights figure Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda two weeks ago, her 19th-century Northern forerunner, a young black schoolteacher who helped integrate New York's transit system by refusing to get off a streetcar in downtown Manhattan, rested in near-perfect obscurity.
Mrs. Parks's resistance on a bus became a central facet of American identity, a parable retold with each succeeding class of kindergartners. But who has ever heard of Elizabeth Jennings?
The disparity is largely an accident of timing. Thanks to television, Americans around the country became a witness to events in 1955 Montgomery, Ala.; by contrast, Jennings's supporters had to rely on a burgeoning but still fragmented mid-19th-century press. By 1955, when Parks refused to be unseated, segregation was emerging as an issue the nation could not ignore. When Jennings, 24, made her stand, on July 16, 1854, the first eerie rebel yell had yet to rise from a Confederate line. Segregation was a local or perhaps a regional story. It was slavery that was tearing the nation apart.
If Elizabeth Jennings was ahead of her time, she was also, on that midsummer Sunday, running late. She was due at the First Colored American Congregational Church on Sixth Street near the Bowery, where she was an organist. When she and her friend Sarah Adams reached the corner of Pearl and Chatham Streets, she didn't wait to see a placard announcing, "Negro Persons Allowed in This Car." She hailed the first horse-drawn streetcar that came along.
As soon as the two black women got on, the conductor balked. Get off, he insisted. Jennings declined. Finally he told the women they could ride, but that if any white passengers objected, "you shall go out ... or I'll put you out."
"I told him," Jennings wrote shortly after the incident, that "I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born ... and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church."
The 8 or 10 white passengers must have stared. Replying that he was from Ireland, the conductor tried to haul Jennings from the car. She resisted ferociously, clinging first to a window frame, then to the conductor's own coat. "You shall sweat for this," he vowed. Driving on, with Jennings's companion left at the curb, he soon spotted backup in the figure of a police officer, who boarded the car and thrust Jennings, her bonnet smashed and her dress soiled, to the sidewalk.
But, like Mrs. Parks a century later, Elizabeth Jennings had her own backup. She had grown up among a small cadre of black abolitionist ministers, journalists, educators and businessmen who stood up for their community as whites harshly reasserted the color line in the decades after New York had abolished slavery in 1827. Her father, Thomas L. Jennings, was a prominent tailor who helped found both a society that provided benefits for black people and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which later moved to Harlem.
The daughter had worked in black schools co-founded by a "conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Her own church - First Colored American - was a place of learning and political rebellion, where, one evening in 1854, addresses on God and the Bible alternated with talks on "The Duty of Colored People Towards the Overthrow of American Slavery" and "Elevation of the African Race."
After the incident aboard the streetcar, Jennings took her story to this extended family. Her letter detailing the incident was read in church the next day; supporters forwarded the letter to The New York Daily Tribune, whose editor was the abolitionist Horace Greeley, and to Frederick Douglass' Paper, which both reprinted it in full. Meanwhile, her father made contact with a young white lawyer named Chester Arthur.
Arthur, who would go on to become president upon the assassination of James Garfield in 1881, was at the time a beginner in his 20's only recently admitted to the bar. He nevertheless won the case, against the Third Avenue Railway Company; a judge ruled that "colored persons if sober, well behaved, and free from disease" could not be excluded from public conveyances "by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence," according to newspaper reports. "Our readers will rejoice with us" in the "righteous verdict," remarked Frederick Douglass' Paper.
NEW YORK before the Civil War resembled the Jim Crow South of Rosa Parks's era in at least this respect: A pervasive racial caste system decreed that a great deal of space - in schools, restaurants, workplaces and churches - was strictly off-limits to African-Americans. The city's transit system, in its infancy, was a particularly bitter proving ground.
In the 1830's, when the first omnibus routes were established, the newspaper The Colored American told black New Yorkers, "Brethren, you are MEN - if you have not horses and vehicles of your own to travel with, stay at home, or travel on foot" rather than be "degraded and insulted" on city coaches. But by the time Elizabeth Jennings boarded the streetcar at Chatham and Pearl Streets, the avenues churned with horse-powered public transportation, and the city stretched far beyond 42nd Street, a long way to walk.
Jennings's legal victory did not complete integration of city transit. But blacks actively tested her precedent, in part through the Legal Rights Association, which her father founded for that purpose. In 1859, another case brought by that group resulted in a settlement, and by the following year nearly all the city's streetcar lines were open to African-Americans.
And Elizabeth Jennings? The details of her life have been told most painstakingly by John H. Hewitt, who, in his 1990 study in the journal New York History, reported that he had not uncovered a single biography of the woman, "not even a thumbnail sketch."
But a few things he did learn. She kept teaching. She married a man named Charles Graham. During the 1863 draft riots, when largely Irish rioters vented their rage at a new conscription law on the black people who were their most direct competitors for jobs and homes, Elizabeth and her husband were likely at home on Broome Street, bent over their ailing year-old son, Thomas. According to his death certificate, the child died of "convulsions," perhaps a last manifestation of one of the infectious diseases that sent urban death rates soaring in those years. While the city was reeling in the aftermath of its worst street melee yet, the couple were laying their son's small body to rest in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.
As an older woman, Elizabeth Jennings Graham established, on the first floor of her house at 237 West 41st Street, the city's first kindergarten for black children. The children made art; they planted roots and seeds in the garden. "Love of the beautiful will be instilled into these youthful minds," read an article on the school.
It was there, too, that the woman who boarded the streetcar at Chatham and Pearl Streets died. The year was 1901. She was buried in Cypress Hills, near her son, and a few thousand Union dead.
On Location in the Homeland
By DEREN GETZ as told to JAIMIE EPSTEIN
Do you remember that restaurant scene in "Quiz Show," where John Turturro is told to take the dive? It took me weeks to find that place. And it wasn't even a restaurant. It was the old Grolier Club, between Madison and Park - you've got to think creatively. That's my job. That's what a location scout does. The director gives me a script or a storyboard, and I search for the settings that will make his vision happen. I've been in the business for 25 years, done production work, been a location scout since 1991. The job's still the same as it was, but since 9/11, the game has changed a bit.
For example, it used to be that you could just poke around buildings, walk in, punch a button in the elevator, get out on any floor. You could get onto any roof. I remember one time I was climbing up a stanchion at Rockefeller Center to get a clear shot of Fifth Avenue for a commercial when this security guard tries to stop me. I tell him that it's a public space, I have every right to be there, to go get a cop if he wants to. By the time he comes back with a cop, I've taken my picture. I know the rules.
Of course, security is much tighter now. The bridges are basically off limits, and sensitive areas are even more sensitive. And I guess since the Patriot Act, just taking pictures on the street, which is what I do a lot of, might be interpreted as surveillance and therefore might seem suspicious.
A year or two ago, I was scouting for NBC's fall promos in Midtown near Grand Central and the Chrysler Building. I get paid by the day, so I have to work fast: I walk up and down the street I have in mind, and I shoot semi-panoramic, clicking every 30 or 45 degrees - I get the whole block in, like, three shots, and move on. Anyway, I shoot for maybe three minutes and I'm done, when building-security guys stop me and ask what I am doing. I tell them, but they want my ID. Figuring that it will be quicker to make the guys happy than to tell them they are out of bounds, I give it to them. I don't remember if I had a scouting permit. I often don't because permits are hard to get, not because of 9/11 but because they were being abused, so I tend not to bother. The supervisor takes my ID upstairs and comes back 10 minutes later with it, and I figure that's it.
About two weeks later, I was meeting with the folks who were shooting the NBC promos. We're at the Noho Star having lunch, when I get a call from the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
They want to know where I am. I tell them. They want to know if they can stop by. I say, Sure, if you're here in a half-hour, because we've already ordered. Fifteen minutes later, like in a scene in a movie, an unmarked Taurus pulls up outside and in walk these two guys. I get up to meet them and take them back to the table and introduce them around. One's wearing an ill-fitting suit, and he looks like Dennis Franz from "NYPD Blue" - I think he had a mustache but maybe not. The other one looks like a surfer dude - he's got blond hair and is wearing a pink polo shirt. I say to them, "You look like a cop, but you look like a movie star." I was putting it on a bit for my clients, giving them a good show.
So they're regular guys, but they do the cop thing, ask if I mind stepping away from the table, and as I do, the NBC folks joke, "He's not with us!" The agents and I walk to a table at the back of the restaurant. They want to know why I was taking pictures in Midtown. (How was I supposed to know that part of some government agency had moved near Grand Central?)
I tell them I was scouting locations, and I ask if they want to see the photos; I've got my computer with me. So I boot it up and show them the block they were interested in and some other blocks. They end up thanking me for my time and leaving their cards.
I didn't take it very seriously. I mean, it took them two weeks to follow up, so how important a lead could I have been? It seemed funny at the time. It was surreal. But I told our local association about it - it's called Alsam (the Association of Location Scouts and Managers) - and found out that other scouts had complained as well. And not long after that, some of our members met with the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting. So now the Port Authority, different agencies, area police departments, they all have our names - every agency except Homeland Security, for some reason. And we have laminated ID's with photos: totally legit.
It makes me laugh when I think that in the old days, a buddy and I made fake ID tags when we were scouting for "Law and Order." If someone got belligerent with us, we'd flash them. They were a joke: we just took pictures of each other and cut them out and pasted them onto card stock - totally homemade. They looked pretty good, I guess, but they'd never work now.
On the East Village
It's got a slide show!
From Grit to Gloss
By RICHARD PEREZ
The other day, as I stood on the corner of Astor Place and Lafayette Street, two adorable young Japanese tourists stopped to ask me a question: "Can you tell us where is the East Village?"
I was tempted to say, "The East Village is a state of mind, not a place." But these two young women were obviously demanding more concrete directions. Trying to be helpful, I pointed east.
"Over there," I said, almost adding, "Past the luxury high-rise." As they glanced toward where I was pointing, then back at me, I could almost see the disappointment in their eyes.
Afterward, it occurred to me that I should have said something more, perhaps made mention of the raw pre-Starbucks days, recalled historical facts and luminaries who have since died, provided a brief historic explanation of how the notion and myth of bohemia took root in the West Village and spread east to Alphabet City in the 1960's as part of a brilliant P.R. move by visionary real estate brokers. But it was too late: The young women had straggled off and vanished in the crowd of confused Saturday shoppers, curiosity seekers and aimless slackers like me.
Still, their question continued to bother me, particularly as I looked up from where I stood at the Astor Place tower, the 21-story glass-and-steel condominium that opened last month on what had been a parking lot in front of which, in the late 80's, I used to hawk used hipster lit. My wares were mostly transgressive trade paperbacks, and my customers the kindred 20- and 30-something semi-intellectual would-be author/artists who then populated the neighborhood.
"Architectural Lofts for Sale, From $3.4 Million," proclaimed a large sign on the new tower. Another sign bore the words "Sculpture for Living," suggesting that people who bought into this building weren't simply buying real estate, they were buying "art." This promise presumably had something to do with the aura surrounding the area, the mythical East Village of yore, once the center of the art world and, during the early and mid-80's, home to more than 50 storefront galleries, all now vanished.
The young women's question came to mind again as I gazed at the giant bank of posters advertising the film version of "Rent," the scruffy Off Broadway rock musical about squatters in the age of AIDS. It was born and set on these very streets, then quickly moved to Broadway before making its way to the big screen, where it will open Nov. 23. "No day but today!" the posters proclaimed in stylized, fist-pumping glory as they marched along the scaffolding that stretched from the Astor Place Theater and seemed to wrap around the entire block. "No day but today!"
Another memorable lyric from the musical is "Bohemia, Bohemia's a fallacy in your head ... Bohemia is dead!" sung by the show's convert to capitalism, Benjamin Coffin III.
My thoughts exactly, I said to myself as I looked around the neighborhood and felt like a stranger.
No Day but Yesterday
The commercialization of the East Village began long before "Rent" opened in the tiny (150-seat) New York Theater Workshop in February 1996; even during the previous seven years in which its creator, Jonathan Larson, was shaping the show, the neighborhood he described so vividly had begun to disappear. But the earliest and latest versions of the rock musical serve as almost perfect bookends for the neighborhood's increasingly commercialized transformation during the period they bracketed.
When "Rent" arrived at the New York Theater Workshop, much was made of how the world brought to life inside the playhouse was mirrored on the streets just outside. "One of the nicest things about seeing 'Rent' on East Fourth Street," Margo Jefferson, a critic for The New York Times, wrote shortly after the opening, "is that when you leave (Cafe La Mama is right across the street), you feel a genuine link between theater and life."
"Rent" accurately portrayed a neighborhood populated by transgender, gay and multicultural characters, and its subject matter dealt head on with issues related to a community in swift transition: gentrification, displacement, homelessness, AIDS, drug addiction, community activism and homesteading, a k a squatting. The musical also touched on issues that related to me personally as a would-be-artist/loser: hanging on to your ideals and your creative integrity in light of ever more insidious commercial expectations, the absence of low-cost housing and the absence of health insurance, especially in the time of AIDS.
But to look back at the world from which "Rent" emerged, and to contrast it with the world in which the movie will open, is to look at a chasm. When it comes to the issues that were front and center in the little musical - AIDS, drugs, housing, poverty - practically everything has changed.
Epidemic? What Epidemic?
When I think about "Rent" and about another theatrical classic of the era, "Angels in America," I often wonder, "What happened to the issue of AIDS?"
Was the subject displaced in the news media by the seemingly more urgent threat of terrorism? Or does the presence of new drugs that can prolong life make this illness less of a public issue, despite the fact that nearly a million Americans have been mortally afflicted, more than 500,000 have died, and according to Avert, an international AIDS charity, an estimated 40,000 new HIV infections occur in America each year?
In "Rent," no fewer than four major characters are infected with the disease: Tom Collins, the anarchist turned New York University instructor; Angel, the transvestite street drummer; Roger, the aspiring punk songwriter; and Mimi, the dancer in an S-and-M club whom he loves. The script has references to AZT breaks and Life Support meetings, and the specter of the disease hangs over much of the musical, like a dark cloud waiting to unleash its misery. When the characters sing "No day but today," the words ring in many ears as a cry of desperation.
In real life, the stigma of the disease was so great by the mid-90's that most people kept it secret, even with the first signs of emaciation and the lesions that were a telltale sign of Kaposi's sarcoma, a skin cancer linked with AIDS. Only drug addicts who hung out along the Bowery and in the fringes of Alphabet City were unable to conceal, or were beyond concealing, the ravages of the disease.
At restaurants where I sometimes worked, rumors floated and people dropped out of sight. When people failed to show up for shifts, for days on end, there was true cause for alarm.
Today, subway kiosks are plastered with posters that depict young men and women with glowing expressions and affirm the life-giving properties of the new AIDS cocktails. These days, to mention the disease in a trendy Avenue A martini bar is to attract the kind of looks you might get if you mentioned TB. Especially among a younger crowd, they have no clue what you're talking about.
In Recovery
Another hot-button topic in the East Village in those days was addiction. Whether crack cocaine (in the 80's) or heroin (in the 90's) or alcohol (always), drugs have played an important part in bohemia, both as self-medication and as buffer against the disappointments one faces when pursuing the creative life. In "Rent," two main characters are afflicted: Roger is in recovery, and Mimi, as she confesses in the haunting song "Light My Candle," still likes to "feel good" now and then.
During the 90's, as crack cocaine gave way to the cheaper and more refined heroin, it was impossible to walk more than two blocks in the Lower East Side without being accosted by seemingly ordinary individuals hawking items with names like "Pachunga," "Benny Blanco" and the ever popular "Hellraiser." There followed an avalanche of new and reissued books, like Linda Yablonsky's "Story of Junk," which involved heroin addiction followed by spiritual redemption.
Now and then, in a throwback to the crack cocaine days, shivering addicts could be seen in the twilight, waiting to hoist a bucket up the side of a dilapidated tenement building: first the money floated up, then the scag dropped.
Snort it, smoke it or shoot it up; for a time, heroin seemed part of the local landscape: as you looked north from the Bowery, the Empire State Building loomed like a huge, hot syringe.
Now, of course, the whole scene has changed. Former addicts are "maintaining" or dead. Whispered offers of "double-sealed works" are no longer heard in the neighborhood, nor is it common to see someone tie off between parked cars or at the foot of shadowy basement stairs or in the bathroom of Tompkins Square Park. Former addicts and even dabblers have gone the way of the Bowery bum; I haven't heard the drug mentioned seriously for years.
Changing the Locks
"Everything is rent!" sing the characters in the musical's anthem title song. And today, even more than in the 90's, many New Yorkers find themselves deeply troubled by the growing lack of affordable housing in the area. The Real Estate Board of New York, commenting this year on sales of condominiums south of 14th Street, noted that "prewar condos surged to a median price of $1.275 million." For the first time since the organization started tracking prices over all, median sale prices for condominiums downtown, the group noted, "have been higher than both the Upper East Side and West Side."
At a moment when living expenses in the neighborhood are stratospheric, I often ask myself: Who can still afford a place to sleep in its precincts, let alone risk taking the artist's path? Or, as The Real Deal, a magazine that tracks New York real estate, put it: "The gentrification sweeping Astor Place, a bridge area that was once the inviolate dividing line between the East Village and Greenwich Village in the late 1970's, now means condominium conversions are driving out the urban grit."
In my eyes, the Astor Place tower is the most potent symbol of the absence of urban grit. The developer is the Related Companies, which helped to develop the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. The architects, Gwathmey Siegel, have created buildings for celebrated figures like Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, coincidentally one of the earliest supporters of "Rent" and the first to arrange for the musical's cast recording.
Does the mirrored glass tower, hard by the historic Cooper Union brownstone and the landmark Public Theater, look wildly out of place? Or is it just me?
Well-Scrubbed Sidewalks
The original production of "Rent" was not only set in the East Village, it was performed there as well, and visually, the show perfectly jived with the area's grunginess and romanticized seediness; the set resembled a thrift-store patchwork quilt of the neighborhood, filled with the ragtag clutter of downtown.
That ragtag clutter, characterized by posted fliers, Xerox art/collage and graffiti art on St. Marks Place and elsewhere, was an important part of the raw aesthetic of the place. Most of the shining lights of the East Village art scene - Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer - had begun their careers as graffiti artists. Street posters and the stylized, expressionistic scrawls across a wide range of surfaces were more than an advertising tool; they were a kind of subversive art.
These days, as the neighborhood seeks to make itself ever more attractive to high-end businesses and developers of luxury housing, that kind of expression is strictly contained. Cleanup squads are assigned the task of removing pesky signs of local color, and virtually every light pole and the rare boarded-up storefront are routinely scraped of anarchic artwork and local political announcements or manifestos. Anyone caught posting handmade fliers can be charged with a "quality of life" infraction. Seediness is no longer to be relished.
And what of the local landmarks that defined this neighborhood? One by one, I see them tumbling down.
Variety Photo Plays, the neon-lit theater in front of which Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle parked in "Taxi Driver," was recently demolished. The Polish diner on First Avenue that was the site of a famous breakfast scene between Jodie Foster and Mr. De Niro is also gone, as is the building on 13th Street where the shootout near the end of the film took place.
Disappeared, too, is the complex of neo-Federalist houses at 23 St. Marks Place that served a trio of culturally significant uses; it was the home of the Dom, where Andy Warhol created the Exploding Plastic Inevitable; it was where the Velvet Underground first performed; and it was home to the Electric Circus. In recent years, the complex served as a drug-treatment and community center; the space has been replaced by condos.
Nearby, at 15 St. Marks Place, stood a nondescript two-story building that housed a bar frequented by Allen Ginsberg and other Beats, one that dated to the pre-Stonewall days, when, by order of the State Liquor Authority, it was illegal to serve alcohol to homosexuals. That space, too, has been replaced by condos.
And CBGB, the temple of punk? Stay tuned. The club is embroiled in a messy dispute involving money and is hanging on by its fingernails.
On the Bowery, where I used to see staggering derelicts of all stripes, I now see freakishly upscale restaurants and million-dollar lofts. And coming soon - amid the restaurant supply stores and commercial businesses between Stanton and Rivington Streets - is the 60,000-square-foot, seven-story building for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, for which ground was broken Oct. 11.
Space 2B, at Second Street and Avenue B, could have served as a set for "Rent." The building, also known as the Gas Station, was a scrap-metal sculpture garden and industrial, avant-garde performance space that played host to some the area's wildest bands and performance art. In March 1996, a month after "Rent" moved to Broadway, the outdoor art was bulldozed, and the performance space was replaced by a Duane Reade and luxury apartments.
The Palladium, the famous dance club on 14th Street, was bought in 1997 by New York University and replaced by a high-rise dorm.
That brings me back to Astor Square. The last time I sold my books on the sidewalk, on Thanksgiving 1989, my small inventory was confiscated by the police when I misguidedly included samples of my hand-drawn art. (At the time, books and printed matter were protected as freedom of speech; art was not.)
A few weeks later, I moved my wares down to St. Marks Place, in front of the old Deutsch-Amerikanische building, site of the old St. Mark's Bookshop. In my youthful, earnest folly, I was selling a self-published book of poetry, "Idealism and Early-Wishfillment," which despite my modesty in printing 2,000 copies proved to be an immediate flop.
Not long after that, booksellers who had been protected by the First Amendment found themselves the subject of new municipal restrictions on where and when they could set up shop, and thus, under the guise of public safety, were essentially barred from the streets.
On the integration of the NYC transit system, predating Rosa Parks by almost exactly 100 years
The Schoolteacher on the Streetcar
By KATHARINE GREIDER
AS the civil rights figure Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda two weeks ago, her 19th-century Northern forerunner, a young black schoolteacher who helped integrate New York's transit system by refusing to get off a streetcar in downtown Manhattan, rested in near-perfect obscurity.
Mrs. Parks's resistance on a bus became a central facet of American identity, a parable retold with each succeeding class of kindergartners. But who has ever heard of Elizabeth Jennings?
The disparity is largely an accident of timing. Thanks to television, Americans around the country became a witness to events in 1955 Montgomery, Ala.; by contrast, Jennings's supporters had to rely on a burgeoning but still fragmented mid-19th-century press. By 1955, when Parks refused to be unseated, segregation was emerging as an issue the nation could not ignore. When Jennings, 24, made her stand, on July 16, 1854, the first eerie rebel yell had yet to rise from a Confederate line. Segregation was a local or perhaps a regional story. It was slavery that was tearing the nation apart.
If Elizabeth Jennings was ahead of her time, she was also, on that midsummer Sunday, running late. She was due at the First Colored American Congregational Church on Sixth Street near the Bowery, where she was an organist. When she and her friend Sarah Adams reached the corner of Pearl and Chatham Streets, she didn't wait to see a placard announcing, "Negro Persons Allowed in This Car." She hailed the first horse-drawn streetcar that came along.
As soon as the two black women got on, the conductor balked. Get off, he insisted. Jennings declined. Finally he told the women they could ride, but that if any white passengers objected, "you shall go out ... or I'll put you out."
"I told him," Jennings wrote shortly after the incident, that "I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born ... and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church."
The 8 or 10 white passengers must have stared. Replying that he was from Ireland, the conductor tried to haul Jennings from the car. She resisted ferociously, clinging first to a window frame, then to the conductor's own coat. "You shall sweat for this," he vowed. Driving on, with Jennings's companion left at the curb, he soon spotted backup in the figure of a police officer, who boarded the car and thrust Jennings, her bonnet smashed and her dress soiled, to the sidewalk.
But, like Mrs. Parks a century later, Elizabeth Jennings had her own backup. She had grown up among a small cadre of black abolitionist ministers, journalists, educators and businessmen who stood up for their community as whites harshly reasserted the color line in the decades after New York had abolished slavery in 1827. Her father, Thomas L. Jennings, was a prominent tailor who helped found both a society that provided benefits for black people and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which later moved to Harlem.
The daughter had worked in black schools co-founded by a "conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Her own church - First Colored American - was a place of learning and political rebellion, where, one evening in 1854, addresses on God and the Bible alternated with talks on "The Duty of Colored People Towards the Overthrow of American Slavery" and "Elevation of the African Race."
After the incident aboard the streetcar, Jennings took her story to this extended family. Her letter detailing the incident was read in church the next day; supporters forwarded the letter to The New York Daily Tribune, whose editor was the abolitionist Horace Greeley, and to Frederick Douglass' Paper, which both reprinted it in full. Meanwhile, her father made contact with a young white lawyer named Chester Arthur.
Arthur, who would go on to become president upon the assassination of James Garfield in 1881, was at the time a beginner in his 20's only recently admitted to the bar. He nevertheless won the case, against the Third Avenue Railway Company; a judge ruled that "colored persons if sober, well behaved, and free from disease" could not be excluded from public conveyances "by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence," according to newspaper reports. "Our readers will rejoice with us" in the "righteous verdict," remarked Frederick Douglass' Paper.
NEW YORK before the Civil War resembled the Jim Crow South of Rosa Parks's era in at least this respect: A pervasive racial caste system decreed that a great deal of space - in schools, restaurants, workplaces and churches - was strictly off-limits to African-Americans. The city's transit system, in its infancy, was a particularly bitter proving ground.
In the 1830's, when the first omnibus routes were established, the newspaper The Colored American told black New Yorkers, "Brethren, you are MEN - if you have not horses and vehicles of your own to travel with, stay at home, or travel on foot" rather than be "degraded and insulted" on city coaches. But by the time Elizabeth Jennings boarded the streetcar at Chatham and Pearl Streets, the avenues churned with horse-powered public transportation, and the city stretched far beyond 42nd Street, a long way to walk.
Jennings's legal victory did not complete integration of city transit. But blacks actively tested her precedent, in part through the Legal Rights Association, which her father founded for that purpose. In 1859, another case brought by that group resulted in a settlement, and by the following year nearly all the city's streetcar lines were open to African-Americans.
And Elizabeth Jennings? The details of her life have been told most painstakingly by John H. Hewitt, who, in his 1990 study in the journal New York History, reported that he had not uncovered a single biography of the woman, "not even a thumbnail sketch."
But a few things he did learn. She kept teaching. She married a man named Charles Graham. During the 1863 draft riots, when largely Irish rioters vented their rage at a new conscription law on the black people who were their most direct competitors for jobs and homes, Elizabeth and her husband were likely at home on Broome Street, bent over their ailing year-old son, Thomas. According to his death certificate, the child died of "convulsions," perhaps a last manifestation of one of the infectious diseases that sent urban death rates soaring in those years. While the city was reeling in the aftermath of its worst street melee yet, the couple were laying their son's small body to rest in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.
As an older woman, Elizabeth Jennings Graham established, on the first floor of her house at 237 West 41st Street, the city's first kindergarten for black children. The children made art; they planted roots and seeds in the garden. "Love of the beautiful will be instilled into these youthful minds," read an article on the school.
It was there, too, that the woman who boarded the streetcar at Chatham and Pearl Streets died. The year was 1901. She was buried in Cypress Hills, near her son, and a few thousand Union dead.
Re: off topic
Date: 2005-11-15 08:53 pm (UTC)