Looking Backwards to See Penn Station’s Future

The magnificent original Penn Station - Via Wikipedia

There is something magical about the approach to New York on a Penn Station-bound train. Arriving from points North, the train rumbles under the George Washington Bridge before racing alongside the Hudson River and the West Side Highway’s traffic. Trains from points South pull out of Newark and within moments are flying through the Meadowlands with Midtown’s skyline glistening in the distance. Both of those entrances pale in comparison to the beauty of the Hell’s Gate approach. Rising over the confluence of the Harlem and East rivers and the Long Island Sound, a passenger with a window seat at sunset or in the evening feels like they are gliding through a movie before rushing over Astoria and diving underground towards Midtown.

This magic is fleeting. That bridge – Hell’s Gate – is named after the impact that the confluence of rivers has on the water, but it could very well describe what awaits any passenger getting off the train at Penn Station.

It’s important to remember the Penn Station we have today is not our grandfather’s Penn Station. Especially, as the MTA made a big to do yesterday about Grand Central Terminal’s upcoming 100th anniversary next year. Rightfully so. It is the Crown Jewel of American Rail Terminals, up there with Union Stations in Chicago, Los Angeles and DC, respectively.

There is another rail terminal anniversary coming up in 2013 that New Yorkers would be wise to take note of. Next year is the fiftieth anniversary of the demolition of the original Penn Station, knocked down to make room for Madison Square Garden and a handful of non-descript office buildings.

At the time of the demolition of the Beaux-Arts station structure which had opened in 1910, The New York Times wrote, “a city gets what it wants, is willing to pay for, and ultimately deserves.”

That editorial central message still resonates. Especially when it comes to Penn Station. The modernized Penn Station is a haphazard bunker doubling as the  entry point for hundreds of thousands of travelers. Beyond just the aesthetic shortcomings, long painfully obvious in this “improvement,” the station is now reaching a critical juncture.

Beaux-Arts knew how to make an entrance - Via Wikipedia

Long at capacity, Penn Station’s future is joined at the hip, in some ways, with the future of high-speed rail in the United States. As it stands today, the station serves as the mid-point in America’s only answer for high speed rail, the Acela-traversed Northeast Corridor. In spite of Congressional obstinance and construction delays, I’d be willing to bet Mitt Romney’s $10,000, we will one day see European style high-speed rail in this country. Amtrak has already proposed a next-generation HSR corridor that would halve travel times between DC and Boston.

The only way to bring more trains into New York City is to increase the number of tracks coming in – currently two under the Hudson and four under the East River – and the number of platforms available.

This is where that Times editorial is just as relevant today as it was almost fifty years ago. We get what we pay for and what we deserve. Maybe you’ve heard about Moynihan Station. The efforts to restore the grandeur of old Penn Station would be achieved by moving Amtrak across the street to the equally Beaux-Art Farley Post Office. In 2006, construction for both phases of Moynihan Station was projected at a cool $3.2 billion dollars. Want to guess how many more trains that $3.2 billion would be able to bring into Penn Station? Or how many of those would be new High-Speed consists? If you guessed zero, you’d be spot-on. Right now, just phase 1 which includes the entrance at the post office and some new stairs has been funded, with construction set to wrap up in 2016

Is it a mall? Is it a bunker? No, it's "modern" Penn Station!

I get the desire to bring the Beaux-Art Penn Station back from dead. In a perfect world, I’d be camping out like there were new Apple products about to be sold in the run-up to its opening. But, we live in a world of finite resources, especially when it comes to public transit in general, and passenger rail infrastructure in particular. If we throw money to aesthetic projects, we make it harder to increase train capacity and improve the infrastructure to the point that it can handle next generation high speed rail.

Historian Vincent Scully may be right that where “One entered the city like a god one scuttles in now like a rat.” Penn Station remains the busiest passenger transportation facility in the United States, serving 1,000 passengers every 90 seconds. As our population continues to grow and rail becomes a more popular mode of traveling, once again, our infrastructure will need to meet this increased demands. Count me as one scurrying rat who wants federal and state funds going towards increased capacity and improved infrastructure in lieu of cosmetic improvements. It would be our generation’s Penn Station demolition to do otherwise.

Sonic Monday – The Low Anthem’s Apothecary Love

The appeal of the iPod is in it’s portability. The ability to listen to one’s entire music catalogue makes the CD player seem like a Model T. Despite this ease, my favorite feature on the iPod is the movie moments it creates where the song and your location mesh perfectly.

Of all the locations in New York City, Grand Central Terminal is the one where I’ve had the most movie moments. With its marble floors, the low ceiling hallways feeding into the Main Hall, people criss-crossing the terminal en route to their destinations and the constellations on the ceiling, the crown jewel of the old New York Central system is majestic.

The Low Anthem - Via CoverMeSongs.com

That is what makes the video of  The Low Anthem’s “Take Away Show” in Grand Central Terminal particularly fitting. Playing the song “Apothecary Love,” the four-piece band that met at Brown University hold court in the early afternoon of a pre-Thanksgiving weekday and provide an unexpected soundtrack to the early winter Grand Central Terminal.

As the camera waltzes around the band members, it catches moments in the life of the city. Tourists wandering around a landmark, Metro-North workers pausing from their work to enjoy the music, and children taking it all in. And then there are the New York commuters who ignore the four musicians, either because they have a train to catch or they just don’t acknowledge anything out of the ordinary during their commutes.

As The Low Anthem sing, “I’ve got the cure for the shape that you’re in,” I couldn’t help but think back to moments in my life where I’ve been on my way back to New York, typically by train, and met at the grandeur lacking Penn Station, typically by the girl in my life. And as much as I love to travel and as much I enjoy riding the rails, at the end of a trip, there is nothing better than stepping off the train, ascending the stairs, passing folks who are just beginning their voyages and finding the cure for being on the road and away from home.

Francine Prose’s My New American Life – Blitz 2K12 Vol. 7

My New American Life (Not a show on NPR) - Via ColumbiaFestival.com

As I approach my 27th birthday, I’ve started to realize I can’t eat crap food everyday. At lunch time, I’ve excised the Chipotle burritos for salad made at home. I’ve switched out the faux healthy Honey Bunches of Oats for some bland fiber heavy cereal. I’ve even started taking Metamucil every morning. Gone are empty calories. Food with nothing in it has become persona non grata. In a lot of ways, Francine Prose’s My New American Life is the literary equivalent of empty calories.

Now that isn’t to say the book isn’t good. It has the feel of a well-done summer books that your parents use to take to the pool or beach and read as they hung out with your stuff. Maybe it was that the novels I read before and after My New American Life were exceptionally powerfully. Still, as I look back at Prose’s novel, I can’t shake an empty feeling. A feeling that leaves me wondering if this book really deserved to be selected as one of the top 50 pieces of fiction from 2011.

The titular new life in America is Lula’s, a twenty-something from Albania who landed in Manhattan’s Lower East Side with fellow Albanian Dunia. After working as a waitress at one of those Tex-Mex places better known for their large servings of alcohol and even larger groups of intoxicated New Yorkers, Lula is hired by Mr. Stanley to be a live in babysitter for his teenage son Zeke, and in some ways to him as well.

Mr. Stanley and Zeke find themselves living in a spacious house in Baywater, New Jersey in the wake of Mrs. Stanley going away on Christmas Eve. Originally a professor, Mr. Stanley was lured to Wall Street by big money and the belief that he could help the little guy. While the former happened, the latter never materialized. Set in 2005, he tells others about an impending economic crisis that sounds a lot like a laundry list of what happened in 2008. The other key player in this superficially placid suburban setting is Mr. Stanley’s friend, Don. A big shot lawyer whose specialty is immigration, he is also investigating ongoing detainee practices at Guantanamo Bay, and is working to get Lula in the country permanently.

Then all hell brakes loose and the novel sounds as grounded in reality as the Albanian fairytales Lula passes off as her own creative writing to Mr. Stanley and Don. While Zeke is at school and Mr. Stanley is at work, Lula is visited by three Albanian wanna-be mobsters who are nothing more than small-time thugs. After she lets them into the house, they ask her to hide a gun for them. The three of them – Alvo, the leader, Guri, and Genti – continue to visit her. She starts to fall for Alvo and when she notices signs that someone has been in the house while she is out, she hopes it’s Alvo in an effort to see her. In an evening that includes Alvo and Lula attending an Albanian concert in a Bronx warehouse, as well as  the return of Mrs. Stanley, and her subsequent departure, the story reaches its most incredulous.

All of this is happening around Zeke, an uninspired teenager doing everything he can to avoid college. Eventually his father forces him to visit a college and the sequence of events during that trip nearly matche the night of Albanians in the Bronx and Mrs. Stanley back in Baywater.

Francine Prose: Easily a Top 5 name for author - Via CUNY

Inevitably, the lies Lula has been spinning about everything from her short stories to her efforts to get Don to aid Alvo during his legal troubles are brought to light. Her hand is forced and she must find another way to keep her new American life going. Enter Dunia, whom Lula had assumed had been kidnapped. Turns out she hit the jackpot and married a plastic surgeon who lives in New Jersey. And the way that subplot is resolved feels like it was ripped from the id of a reality show producer who spends their day creating “reality” for suburban dimwits on cable channels you didn’t know you had.

The book ends with Lula on the George Washington Bridge. In traffic. In an SUV. The how she got there and the where she is going are just as improbable as the rest of the story.

Maybe it’s the suburbs or Jersey. I’ve never really lived in the suburbs and though I’ve spent a serious amount of time in the Garden State, maybe that is how things happen for some folks who make their lives in towns like Summit, villages named Baywater or other locales plastered on exit signs on the highways that lace through the state like veins. Or, maybe, the whole book is one big tall tale told written by Prose, told by some unseen and unknown narrator that has as much basis in reality as Lula’s Albanian fairy tales. Maybe.

7 Reasons Extending the 7 Train to NJ is a Bad Idea

7 Train is up for a promotion - Via New York Times

It must have been a nice change of pace over at MTA headquarters yesterday morning. After several news cycles of being hammered for for their poorly received pilot program to remove trash cans from platforms in two subway stations, a different transit issue captured the New York Post’s headlines.

The Bloomberg Administration pointed to a draft study touting the benefits of extending the 7 Train to the New Jersey Transit complex in Secaucus, New Jersey. Construction is on-going in extending the 7 from Times Square to a new station on the Far West Side, near the Javits Center. And one unnamed Bloomberg official said the plan to bring the 7 Train to Secaucus is “a heck of a lot better” than the cross-Hudson tunnel torpedoed by Chris Christie.

The idea of building a subway tunnel under the Hudson bubbled to the surface after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie pulled the plug on the Access to the Region’s Core, a tunnel that would have increased New Jersey Transit’s capacity into Penn Station and provided a one-seat ride into Midtown for commuters coming by rail from Bergen County. Christie pulled New Jersey’s funding, which killed the project.

If I ran the MTA, The Count would most definitely be my numbers guy. "The next F Train will arrive in three minutes - ahh ahhh ahh" - Via Muppets Wiki

It is admirable that Mayor Bloomberg and his administration are interested in looking for an end-run around the loss of ARC, and in theory, extending the 7 Train sounds reasonable. On paper, however, it is far more flawed than ARC ever was. To illustrate this, I have identified seven…ahh ahh ahh…reasons why extending the 7 Train is a bad idea.

No Words

There are moments where the written word seem to fail. Where language can’t capture what we’ve seen or continue to feel. I’ve stayed away from writing about the tenth anniversary but these two videos capture a sentiment worth sharing as we pause collectively to remember those who were lost…

…and the city that survived.

Boston Book Blitz – Vol. 20: American Subversive by David Goodwillie

Rutland's Wal-Mart Parking Lot - Via flickr account of NNECAPA

Live in New York City long enough and some of your haunts will make their way into the pages of fiction or the reels of TV and movies. Spend your teenage years up in Vermont’s third largest city, you don’t expect to see its downtown play an important role in the plot of a critically acclaimed novel. In David Goodwillie’s “American Subversive,” Rutland, Vermont is just such a city.

Towards the end of the novel, is it revealed that two characters regularly meet at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Rutland. While any other city in Vermont could have been subbed in, it makes an already realistic book that much more striking. Nestled in downtown, near the Amtrak station, it is a parking lot I’ve driven by, walked through, and passed thousands of times. It is also, at least in “American Subversive,” where two folks discuss plans to use non-lethal violence to promote their fight for what they believe is a better America.

American Subversive by David Goodwillie - Via Observer.com

“American Subversive” is a story with two narrators: Aidan Cole and Paige Roderick. Cole is a blogger who writes for Roorback.com. Imagine Dan Abram’s Mediaite with the sarcastic and ironic bent of Gawker. Cole’s life, including his on again off again relationship with a journalist at The New York Times and his mysterious best friend Julian Touche, are nights filled with parties, access to exclusive clubs, and lots of hangovers. The reader hears from Aidan first and the opening chapter is set after the events of the novel transpire.

Roderick’s already tenuous existence is rocked by the death of her brother, who is serving in Iraq. Having drifted from New York to DC to work for an environmental think tank, she returns back to her native North Carolina. After spending time with her brothers friends, she realizes their back to the earth ways are a facade of sorts to an existence where they attack industrial targets. Roderick quickly rises through the ranks of this decentralized group and moves to Vermont with two other operatives, Keith and Lindsay.

The engine that sets the story in motion is the Vermont cell’s first “Action” as they are labeled. A bomb is placed in a midtown Manhattan office building, targeting a shadowy multi-national corporation. A few days after the bomb detonates in the early morning hours, a photo of Roderick casing the building is sent to Cole’s Roorback email address.

With the narrative switching back and forth, we learn about Cole’s efforts to find Roderick with the unwitting help of his sort-of-kind-of girlfriend and his friend Touche. At the same time, we learn that in the wake of the Vermont Action, the cell is looking for its next target. While this search is progressing, the dynamic between Paige, Keith, and Lindsey is shifting dramatically. This tension only ratchets up the intensity that comes develops with Keith’s unilateral decision to target a media company whose similarity to Fox News is so close they practically share the same Manhattan office space.

Author David Goodwillie - Photo by Marion Ettlinger

The novel, which is well-written and paced pitch perfectly, includes a handful of unfolding mysteries that come into vision as the story rushes to its conclusion. These include, but are not limited to: will Aidan, a J school drop out, find Paige? Will it make any difference if he does go public with the information he discovers? What becomes of Paige? Will Keith’s plan for the Fox News doppelganger succeed? All of these are answered as people in Aidan’s personal orbit, like his girlfriend, his best friend, and his mother’s upstate artist boyfriend figure into the story’s resolution.

Unlike many of the other novels on the Times list, the family structure is not the prominent construct pulsing through the story – it isn’t the identity that the characters are struggling with. Instead, the characters in “American Subversive”  wrestle with what it means to be an American in this century, as members of a generation who will be given a country that is gasping – overstretched by two wars, fighting a war against a tactic, hampered by an economy hobbled by a financial meltdown. These characters struggle with the real world issues of what it means to be an American. One chronicles the over-consumption of the rich and spoiled, the other lost her brother in the streets of Mosul. Paige and Aiden may be fictional, but their worries are real. They go beyond themselves. They see a world struggling and a country focused on the maximization of profit. “American Subversive” is a study of how far some people go when they have nothing else.

On top of the story, Goodwillie’s description of Manhattan and New York seemed spot on. Even when he name drops Zadie Smith, Jenny Lewis, and other bold names, it doesn’t feel ostentatious or showy. It fits and that is a credit to the author’s writing. That being said, there are two glaring instances and a particularly humorous edit in the book that I want to share. First, Aidan Cole takes Amtrak directly from New London, CT to Yonkers, NY as he travels to see his mother in upstate New York. The only way Cole could have made it to Yonkers from New London is with a transfer in Penn Station. Minor, I know, but still.

Second, Goodwillie is on point when he describes Williamsburg in the early to mid 2000s and its transformation into a destination today. However, when forced to describe the bar scene in other parts of Brooklyn, he is less sharp. A throw away line about a possible night out on Smith Street describes girls loaded with tattoos. I am not too sure that the streets of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill are filled with those types of girls. Again, a small issue, but something that stands out.

Recently, I have been checking out my books from the Cambridge Public Library. On one of the pages, the word beneficiary had been scratched out and a previous reader had written in pencil, benefactor. To whomever this mysterious editor was, thanks for the chuckle and the concern for me, the future reader. My suggestion to you is to go out and get this book.

The Boston Book Blitz, Vol. 17: Mickey Mantle, America’s Childhood and Hero Worship

Earlier in the Boston Book Blitz Series (which will soon be coming to you from Brooklyn, but more on that at some later point), we reviewed Howard Bryant’s “The Last Hero,” a biography of baseball great Henry “Hank” Aaron. Throughout his playing days and post-baseball life, Aaron has had to deal with fans thinking of him only as Hank Aaron the ballplayer, not Henry Aaron the person. To us it may seem like only a few letters difference, but to Aaron it is the difference between those who want something from him and those people he considers friends.

The Last Boy by Jane Leavy - Via Openlettersmonthly.org

While reading Jane Leavy’s biography of Mickey Mantle, “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle And The End Of America’s Childhood,” I was struck by a comment Mantle made that he never figured out who The Mick, Mickey Mantle, was. For so long, he did what his father had wanted and told him to, that only late in life did he figure out what he wanted. These baseball icons couldn’t be more different in the ways they approached the game. Aaron was meticulous in his studying of the game and pitchers while Mantle was known to have played games hung-over and on at least one instance was out so late that he missed the team’s train to the next city and had to pay a cabbie to get him to the stadium in time for batting practice in the next city. Imagine the field day in the New York press if Alex Rodriguez missed the team’s flight from Chicago to Minnesota after a night of partying.

“The Last Boy” is not your traditional biography. It is broken down into five parts with twenty different chapters spread through the entirety of the book, each focusing on a specific day in Mantle’s life. Leavy uses the events of each day to flesh out Mantle’s life story. The figurative knuckleball to this set-up comes in the form of the story of Leavy, as a Washington Post reporter meeting a long retired Mantle at an Atlantic City casino for an interview in 1983. This story is told in parts at the beginning of each section.

Growing up in New York City as a Yankees fan, even in the 1990s before the Yankees dynasty started, players like Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle seemed like these epic greats who graced the diamond in the Bronx and in comparison to the players of my youth who seemed to be making headlines for going on strike or getting in trouble with the law, were the not-at-all realistic ideal of playing nine frames and then going home to have dinner with their wives.

Author and Yankees Fan Jane Leavy - Via 123people.com

My first encounter with the reality of Mickey Mantle as a baseball player with human flaws came in the form a 1984 or ’85 baseball almanac that my neighborhood library was selling for a quarter. After pouring through the rosters of all 26 teams and getting my first taste of fantasy baseball, I stumbled upon an excerpt from a book chronicling the hard partying, heavy-drinking ways of Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin, and other Yankees of the 1950s. While tame enough for an eight year to read, the author’s tone made it seem like the shenanigans were just boys being boys and that the guys were still ready to play ball the next day. Leavy’s book makes it clear that was not always the case.

Mickey Mantle’s career was far shorter than it should been. His playing days were cut down by illnesses from his childhood like osteomylitis and a litany of on-field injuries, including the ghastly leg injury in the 1951 World Series when Mantle’s foot got caught in a Yankee Stadium drainage pipe jutting out from the outfield grass. These ailments were only exacerbated by the drinking and the epic disregard Mantled showed for his health and body. Reading “The Last Boy” is an exercise in patience when dealing with a Mantle who wanted nothing more than to play and would take the field injured, but when it came to his conditioning and taking care of himself, consistently dropped the ball.

The investigative work undertaken by Jane Leavy for this book is impressive. In her efforts to shine the stadium lights of reality on the Mantle myths, she finds the old man who as a child found the homerun ball Mantle hit out of DC’s Griffiths Stadium as she tries to pinpoint how far it  actually traveled on the fly. She reaches out to scientists and sabrmetric experts to break down Mantle’s swing and find out his value to the Yankees. She even interviews the doctors who performed the controversial liver transplant Mantle underwent weeks before his death and explains how his celebrity played no role in receiving the liver.

Mickey Mantle in His Prime - Via fabcongress.com

From her interviews with members of the Mantle family and his friends, she explains how Mantle was sexually abused by a step sister as well as by a neighborhood boy. These traumatic events inevitably impacted the way he treated women and sex in his life.

This willingness to uncover who Mantle really was is what eventually makes “The Lost Boy” so disappointing as Leavy doesn’t hold Mantle accountable. When she addresses Mantle’s affairs, his disregard for his wife and family, and the second woman he ends up spending his last years with, she does so with kid gloves. In some ways, it feels as if Mantle is getting one last pass, just like he did when he was alive.

Leavy’s claim that Mantle played a starring role in the end of America’s childhood seems far fetched to me. Mantle’s career spanned the 1950s and 1960s. If any players were central to ending America’s childhood, it was those like Jackie Robinson, Aaron, Willie Mays, Larry Doby, Elston Howard, and the hundreds of other African-American ballplayers who broke color barriers or followed in their footsteps, suffering the humiliations of minor league games in southern cities during the Jim Crow era and the fight for civil rights. Mantle’s serves as a north star of reverence to baby boomers quoted in the book and throughout America, even though to this jaded millennial, he represents squandered opportunities and a disregard for those closest to him. His role in the end of America’s childhood only comes at the tail end of his own life where the consequences of alcohol abuse (which Mantle struggled at the end of his life to give up) and a lifestyle where he boasted to Leavy he led the league in crabs six different years was personified in the husk of a man Mantle had become.

The Mick in the 1990s

“The Last Boy” is never a hagiography, but Leavy makes no qualms about the fact that she grew up worshipping the Yankees, in particular Mickey Mantle, as a child in the Bronx. Maybe it is the last drops of a child’s hero worship or the seemingly close bond she developed with Mantle’s family while writing the book, because in comparison to “The Last Hero,” Leavy seems more eager to shield Mantle from a full-on examination of his actions, his reasons for doing so, and the consequences and end with the belief that Mantle truly was a boy, even when he was nothing more than an adult blessed with the superhuman ability to hit, run, and throw. It is as if, after years of Mantle’s finances being exploited by hucksters, his name and autograph commoditized by weekend memorabilia shows, Leavy shied away from what she feared would be one last piece of exploitation: describing Mantle as what he really was.

The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Have Nothing to do with Gossip Girl, But Is Better Than Franzen’s Freedom

The Privileges Front Cover

The artwork for the front cover of The Privileges by Jonathan Dee does the book a huge disservice. The picture leaves you wondering if you’ve picked up the literary equivalent of the tv show Gossip Girl. The one note on the front cover that says otherwise is a glowing quotation from none other than “America’s Great Novelist,” Jonathan Franzen. The funny thing is Franzen’s Freedom and Dee’s The Privileges tell similar types of stories about contemporary American families. The only differences is that Dee tells the story better, shaves off more than 300 pages, and manages to only piss off the reader on the very last page.

The Privileges is the story of Adam and Cynthia Morey and their kids April and Jonas. Opening at Adam and Cynthia’s wedding, the couple is charmed. They have been  and throughout the story remain amazingly lucky. In the real world, Cynthia’s mid-book depression when the kids are not quite old enough for school would lead to greater trouble in the marriage than it does in Dee’s story. There is a similar flight of fancy when Adam manages to evade any SEC investigation into his investing success based on some not-so-public information. Thats not to say the story comes off the wheels because of these issues, but in a story so in tune with the way the world its characters occupy works, it is more obvious.

Jonathan Dee - Via NewYorker.com

The book concludes around the time Jonas, the youngest child, is finishing up his undergrad at the University of Chicago. In 200 some odd pages, Dee covers nearly a quarter century of this families history. The only troubling aspect to Dee’s story is the manner in which he concludes it. I’m not the type of reader who needs or wants the story to end perfectly, sitting there, as if the author typed the last sentence and then put a bow on it. In the world that is this story, the characters keep living and most days, here in the real world, do not end neat. Things are unresolved. Issues unfinished. Errands to run and people to get back to. All of this is to say, I understand and appreciate a less than neat ending. However, Dee gives us a vertigo inducing last page.

While all four major characters get their wrap-up, it is Jonas whose conclusion is the last in the novel. The situation Jonas finds himself in is kind of zany, but at the same time it allows Dee to use art and creating as a way to talk about human nature. It is immediately after Jonas’ situation is resolved, on the last page, the Jonas on that page is nothing like the character we have seen throughout the story. If an editor had excised that last page, this book would have been great. Now, with almost two different versions of Jonas, it is just very good.

Jonathan Franzen wants to share more details about his characters with you!

Still better than Freedom. The more I thought about it, the difference was that Dee sketches his characters’ histories with a lighter touch than Franzen, who seems deadset on providing a serious family tree for most characters while trying to push the story forward. Dee is also less caught up in providing the reader with every little detail about everything.  The one difference I truly appreciated was Dee’s ability to tell a tale about contemporary America without feeling like he had to shoe-horn in major events in American history like the September 11 attacks, the Iraq War, and the Bush Presidency/Obama campaign. For that, I say thank you to Mr. Dee.

Would You Let Someone Destroy MOMA in Favor of Apartments?

Sometimes I’ll read an article or blog post bemoaning the gradually dissappearing ‘edginess’ of New York City. Most of the time, I don’t take such pieces too seriously since they, more often than not, equate crime, dirtiness or silliness like Off Track Betting with the character that is being lost, while informal institutions of art and culture fall to the wayside with little or no protest. Now, I’m not talking about protesting new archways or paneling of a building that still maintains its original use or theme. Many times, those protesting such changes don’t really know or understand why they are doing so, and they get caught up in the small details at the expense of the big picture.

Every now and then, however, there comes a time when it is wholly justified to stand in the way of forces that threaten a significant cultural center, even if said center isn’t very well known. Which is why I’m dismayed, though not very surprised, at the lack of writers, activists and media outlets coming to the defense of one of the very institutions I speak of, whose very existence is now at stake.

Panoramic view of 5 Pointz

5 Pointz in Long Island City is widely considered to be one of the world’s great standing street art and graffiti exhibitions, providing artists with space on the outer walls of a 200,000 square foot factory building and fairly priced studio space within the building itself. Founded in 1993 as the Phun Factory, the purpose of using this particular building was to encourage street artists to showcase their work in a formal, legal setting and expand the scope of their work. Today, it is known worldwide as one of the greatest havens for graffiti artists to create their work, and it costs nothing to enjoy the final product – you can see much the art from the 7-train as it leaves Queens Plaza.

Along with other such spaces, street artists and events, 5 Pointz can be partly credited with transforming what was once considered to be a lower form of art (if at all), limited to the inner city and done illegally, into a medium that can you can now place a bid on at Christie’s and other auction houses. All you need to do to see how far street art has come is watch Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary about the complete absurdity of the art world viewed through the lens of street art.

As contemporary visual art spaces go, 5 Pointz is second to none, offering a unique perspective into this still emerging mainstream artform. People were creating art there at the Phun Factory when no one else cared to even make the trip to LIC to see it. Now that the area is primo real estate, as young professionals are priced out of Brooklyn and Manhattan, the owner of the space, developer Jerry Wolkoff, who has himself called 5 Pointz a ‘great place,’ is seeking to redevelop the property. His $350 million plan includes residential buildings in place of the 200 studios presently there and commercial space in place of the walls these artists have used as their canvass for 18 years.

Simply exploring the idea of destroying 5 Pointz in order to build residential and commercial property says all we need to know about the status of street art, its place in the art world and how far it still has to come before it is truly taken seriously, and that is a shame.

5 Pointz from below the 7-train

Anyone who has read my December 20th post on the Provincetown Playhouse knows that I’m not one of those people who constantly hollers, kicks and screams any time something changes in this city. What is most important to me is that an art space’s essence and purpose is preserved, rather than specific elements of the building itself. While I am sticking to that sentiment in this case, 5 Pointz shows us that in order to protect that essence and purpose here, we must preserve this physical space.

There are few spots that offer such a vivid image of the New York City I know and love, and 5 Pointz is one of them. It brings street artists of different backgrounds, different skill levels and different visions together around one space. And unlike other museums, it doesn’t only showcase well-known artists. The very definition of street art makes it a medium that is meant to be accessible to all – it is ground level instead of ivory tower, it is created within the surrounding environment rather than in spite of it and it communicates to people within the people’s domain. It is in that sense that 5 Pointz is a premier contemporary art space that reflects the medium it is showing, and it should be treated as such.

Staircase inside 5 Pointz

It offers a truly unique urban feel, the New York grittiness that so many people wax poetic about. And it’s about to fall victim to the continued homogenization of this city, another in a long line of casualties that has that has claimed other capitals of art and culture that we were once proud of here.

So take a moment and visit 5ptz.com to learn more about the space and sign their petition to let Mr. Wolkoff know that you value the art that has been created there throughout the years, and you think it should be allowed to continue. Or at least take a look out of the window the next time you ride the 7-train.

The Geographic Identity Crisis of The New York Jets

I’ve kept my silence for long enough. I’ve grinned. I’ve beared it. But I can take it no longer. It is time to take out a map of the New York/New Jersey area and have someone point out to me where in New York the Giants and Jets play.