No Bernie for You, but Bizarre Even By NYC Standards

Earlier this month the NYT unfolded over three days this story -- two men propped their dead friend up in a computer chair and wheeled him along W. 52st Street to a check cashing business on 9th Avenue. There they left him in the chair on the sidewalk and went inside in an attempt to cash the deceased's Social Security check of some $300. That stretch of 9th Avenue is a snapshot of old and gentrifying Hell's Kitchen, new Thai and other restaurant locations sharing blocks with empty store fronts and shoddy drug and convenience stores. It is very crowded with both foot and vehicular traffic. You don't leave a dead person in a chair in broad daylight and not attract attention. And so it was this sunny January day -- passersby, a police officer having a slice of pizza next door, and the suspicious check store clerk himself all wondered about the guy in the chair. The arrest was made as the two friends were attempting to move the chair into the store to satisfy the clerk's request to have the check recipient present. Not quite sure how they planned to have him endorse the check.

That was day one's story. The next two days brought the names of the three friends and their sad, close to the edge lives -- drug problems, prison terms for petty larcenies and frauds, complicated health probelms, physical weakness that made it difficult for the dead man and his roommate to climb even one flight of stairs to their apartment. Neighbors, as they always are, were quoted, "good people," "kept to themselves," "down on their luck." They also said the dead man lived his whole life in the 52st St. apartment. I've been on that street on my bicycle. It's gritty now and probably always has been. It's Hell's Kitchen after all. But like that life that ended a day or so before becoming a very public spectacle, Hell's Kitchen will pretty much be over in the next few years of far West Side midtown boom, and its rough streets and (sometimes too) quirky characters will be smoothed out by expensive restorations to interiors of existing buildings or replaced by luxury apartment blocks like the bland one around the corner on 53rd.

Here just over two years and already joining the bemoan chorus of Lost New York.

"Everything in America is Bigger....Even Peas."

Who would ever have thought, even in the midst of global warming, that on January 7 in New York Harbor on the way to Liberty Island people would be peeling off outer layers of clothing, but so it was as the temps soared above sixty. You get your own taste of an Ellis Island experience as you wait to board the ferry -- first outside after buying tickets as you snake through the cordons and then inside the tent at dockside where the herders keep urging visitors to "move forward" or "fill in" and then when the gangplank comes down and everyone presses forward at once. But once we got to Liberty, nee Bedloe Island, so long as we avoided the concessions, it felt like we had the island to ourselves, especially inside the base of the monument, an add-on I just stumbled upon making the online ticket buy even though the informational brochures say you need two days advance reservation. Inside the base we walked through the chronologically-arranged exhibition that tells the history of the statue from conception to the bicentennial restoration to Liberty's status as universal commercial icon (a status amply exploited by the island's own concession store where we passed up the opportunity to buy a Statue of Liberty mask, a Statue of Liberty crown, and every other junk bit). The Statue is made of copper sheets, only two pennies thick, and still weighs 225 tons pounds. To have constructed it any other way would have made its weight unsupportable. The idea of the statue, originating with the French politician Edouard de Laboulaye, was in its own way subversive, to contrast the liberty just successfully defended in the U.S. through the North's triumph in the Civil War with the repression of the Second Empire in France. The designer, sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, modeled it in part on an earlier design for a statue in Egypt, in part on the Colossus of Rhodes, and in part on the face of his mother. He traveled to the US in 1871 looking for a site, giving posterity both the "peas" quote and the choice of Bedloe Island. The statue was build in France, disassembled, shipped to the U.S. and riveted together by immigrant workmen on site on the island. They worked without scaffolding and unlike that other nearby marvel, the Brooklyn Bridge, no one died in its assembly. The statue was meant to symbolize enlightenment but thanks in part to Emma Lazurus's "The New Colossus" poem came instead to mean "welcome" to the immigrants who came through the Narrows, past it and into New York Harbor. The museum has full size replicas of the Statue's face and one of the feet, showing the scale -- taller than me --, the relative light weight of the copper sheathing and the craftsmanship, including the thousands of copper rivets. It was an inspiring day, but most of all thanks to the display of excerpts from letters written to Lee Iacocca, chair of the restoration campaign. They contained small donations, no more than a dollar in some cases, and came from those who decades before had sailed past Liberty, built the new lives they'd sought and now wanted to give back to the restoration campaign. Most of the visitors the day we visited seemed to come more from out of country than out of city/state, perhaps a commentary on the weak dollar. As for us, we were tourists in our own city. You could do that for a long time in New York.

Tom Lantos

Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced he will not run for re-election after he was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. Lantos, who often discomfited right and left alike with his unflagging insistence on respect for human rights anywhere and everywhere they are abused, will be missed. His press release announcing his decision is the best recent description I have read of why this country matters and why it continues to be the powerful attraction it is -- " It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country." Our challenge, Lou Dobbs and others aside, is not to close or further limit that promise and opportunity, but to extend it further, and most especially to those who currently hold the United States in deep suspicion.

Curd? Curd???

So Bianca came back from Wisconsin with cheese curds. Says it's delicious, blah, blah, blah. I don't do curd, any curd. Just look what it rhymes with. Give it an attractive name, I'll try it. Lots more like me -- look what happened when the Patagonian toothfish got remamed Chilean Sea Bass -- immediate overfishing and endangerment. I'll eat most anything once. Just don't call it curd or, for that matter, tofu.