"In Queens"

The actress Amy Ryan has a good career going. I recall her most fondly from the Wire, where she played the hell out of Officer Beatrice "Beadie" Russell. Nice job! She's working consistently, good for her. She's in a new project that looks good. I saw something about it on TV and it drove me to the Internet Movie Data Base to find out more about her. Very interesting.

Her bio says that she was born in "Queens, New York." To someone that was also born in Queens, that's like saying that she was born "on the earth." Queens is a big place, full of people and full of neighborhoods that are so big that they'd be cities anywhere else.

So just where in Queens was Amy Ryan born? What hospital? Flushing Hospital? Queens General? Physicians? Help me out here.

What neighborhood did her parents bring her home to? Long Island City? Malba? Corona? Kew Gardens? Whitestone? Howard Beach? Middle Village? Woodhaven? Queens Village? Bayside? South Ozone Park?

There's a difference, you know. Inquiring minds want to know!

Looking for clues . . . Amy's real name is Amy Beth Dziewiontkowski. I had friends with names like that growing up, so I guess that she could be from College Point. Or maybe Masbeth? Hunter's Point? Somewhere over next to Brooklyn?

It's a mystery, so far. Maybe I'll come across it.

Anyway, I really like Amy Ryan in the Wire, and I'd like to see her new project. Good luck, Amy!

Home girl!!!

New York City: The Worst Weather In The World

My Thai friends are always surprised when I tell them that New York City has the worst weather in the world.  They see these Chamber of Commerce photographs and tourist brochures and it all looks very nice.  Well, they take those photos on nice days, but New York only gets about forty nice days in a year.  The remaining 320 days are problematic.  The problems include, but are not limited to, the heat, the cold, and the rain.  It’s a city of extremes, weather included.  You like hurricanes?  (Typhoons.)  Try a blizzard sometime! 

The Heat

Thailand is hot, but New York is more uncomfortable.  It’s all about the humidity.  Thailand gets high temperatures, but the humidity is generally between sixty-five and eighty-five percent, seasonally.  Humidity in a New York summer can get up to ninety-eight percent.  There’s a difference. 

Yes, New York is hot.  How hot is it, Johnny?  It’s too hot to have the lights on in the house.  If you walked around my town in Queens in the Fifties or Sixties after dark, the houses all had every window and door wide open and the only electric thing that was on was the TV.  It’s too hot to sleep with your head on a pillow.  Too much heat build-up.  You’d sweat to death if it didn’t wake you up first.  Ditto, sleeping on your side, that’s out too. 

There’s a lot of air-conditioning now, but that’s a recent development.  I lived in New York to the age of twenty-seven, and I never had air-con.  Usually not even a fan.  Hot, hot, hot. 

The Cold

New York is slightly less cold than cities further inland, but the dampness in New York compensates nicely.  The dampness intensifies the cold in the same way that the humidity intensifies the heat in summer.  New York is surrounded by water; most people don’t realize that it’s a city composed of islands.  That North Atlantic is a cold ocean, too. 

I remember walking around on days that were so cold that I had to put my glasses in my pocket and cover one eye at a time with a gloved hand.  My eyes were so cold that they felt like they were going to crack open like eggs.  New York is full of skyscrapers like the ocean is full of salt water, and the big buildings create a “canyon effect” that can really drive the wind right through you. 

Snow has one thing in common with war, at least one thing.  Those with no experience of the thing are the most enthusiastic about it.  Snow, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if I never experience snow again, it will be too soon.  Snow is only fun for children.  Even I will admit that snow was a real treat when I was a boy.  We little brats had a lot of fun.  Then you grow up, and snow becomes a nightmare.  Snow makes it harder to get to work; harder to shop for food; harder to dress your children; snow complicates everything. 

Imagine, for a moment, that you have awoken to find that fifteen or twenty inches of snow has fallen overnight.  Well, get busy Charlie, you’ve got work to do.  You look out the window and see a car-shaped pile of snow where you parked last night.  Digging a car out of a blanket of snow is something that the snow inexperienced never consider.  Here’s how it goes:

First, clear the snow off of the trunk.  In the trunk you have brushes for use in clearing the rest of the car, small pieces of heavy rug to use for traction, one or two ice scrapers for the windows, and a snow shovel.  Snow is a lot heavier than it looks in pictures, and all of this shoveling and brushing and scraping is hard work.  At some point, you need to get into the car, which is also a lot harder than it sounds.

The door lock, of course, is frozen solid, and the key will not rotate.  Now you must have a lighter handy.  Hold the key in the fire for a while and put it in the door.  It will not open the first time.  Wait a moment for the heat to transfer to the lock.  Repeat, many times.  Try to rock the key around as you go.  Eventually the door will open. 

Success!  You’re out of your parking space!  And it only took a half hour!  Now all you need to do is slip and slide your way to work!  Have a nice day! 

Even worse than snow is a freezing rain.  Rain! 

Rain

Rain is a constant companion in New York.  The whole year is the rainy season.  Everyone has several pairs of rubber overshoes, waterproof shoes and/or boots.  Everyone has raincoats, maybe more than one.  Everyone has a collection of umbrellas.  It’s never enough.  The sheer volume of rain and wind will overpower everything.  Some days, you get soaking wet in spite of it all.

The worst weather that I have ever encountered was a day in New York that I call a “Thirty-Thirty-Thirty” day.  You’ll have to suffer through a few of these every year.  It’s about thirty-three degrees outside.  Just above freezing, so it’s not snow coming down.  The rainwater itself is about thirty-four degrees, just this side of being ice, and it’s pouring down like there’s no tomorrow.  Add to this a thirty-something mile per hour wind.  That, my friend, is enough to make a grown man cry.  There’s nothing that you can do to stay dry.  Your pants are so wet that freezing water is running down into your shoes.  Your umbrella, if you can keep it from collapsing in the wind, is only a small advantage, because the wind is blowing the rain right up at you, up, down and sideways.  Water is blowing up under your raincoat; it’s running down your neck and up your sleeves.  I’ve gotten to work or school so wet that I could take a bill out of my wallet and squeeze water out of it.  By then you are miles from home, and it will be a long time before you can get into a change of clothes.

What can you do to protect yourself?  Wool, dear reader, wool is your friend.  One of the natural properties of wool is that it retains the ability to contain heat even when wet.  So woolen hats are a must, and woolen anything helps.  Ever see those pictures of Irish kids playing outside on rainy days, all wearing those nice Irish woolen sweaters?  Warm as toast.

Best advice:  if you can keep your head warm, and your feet dry, you probably won’t die.  (Antibiotics help, too.  It was a Thirty-Thirty-Thirty day that killed my grandfather, but that was before penicillin.) 

And it rains all year!  It’s horrible.  Springtime can be nice, but when that will happen is anybody’s guess.  Either April, May, or June, it will probably rain almost every day for the entire month.  I was a letter carrier in 1972, and in June it rained twenty-eight out of the thirty days.  And hard rain, too, none of this sprinkling.  Up through the teen years none of this really bothers you, but once you are officially an adult it starts to get oppressive before long.  I lasted in New York until the age of twenty-seven; by then my wife and I couldn’t take it anymore.  We moved to Los Angeles and never looked back.  Well, almost never, but that’s another story.  The weather in L.A. is like a wonderful fairy tale with a happy ending, and we enjoyed it very much.  It was like surviving the sinking of the Titanic. 

Honorable Mentions

Ice Storms.  These are very dangerous, and very beautiful.  Overnight the temperature is just above freezing and there is a mist falling.  Not real rain, but mist.  As the mist settles on the surfaces of the world, it turns to clear ice.  Clear, smooth, shiny ice.  The ice covers every contour of every tree, every building, and yes, every street.  It’s hell to try to drive in, but it’s swell to see. It’s always gone by about nine a.m.

Atmospheric Inversions.  These are supremely uncomfortable and annoying.  Some kind of bubble forms over the area, like a hundred miles in diameter or something, and the air doesn’t move in or out for about a week.  For all of that time the sun just makes the air get hotter and hotter, and it always seems to start out hot to begin with.  There was a good one in June, 1973, and it was as hot as I’ve ever been in my life.  It was almost 100 degrees, and almost 100% humidity.  And zero movement in the air, for days!  I’d sit under a tree reading, and not one leaf moved one millimeter.  There wasn’t a single sound coming from the trees.  Boy, June really is like a box of chocolates . . . you don’t know what you’re going to get.

Sudden Developments.  Another terrible feature of the weather in New York is the profound unpredictability of it all.  No one on the earth has a clue what the weather will be tomorrow.  The worst thing about this is that they try, and they guess, those TV weathermen, those so-called meteorologists.  It’s a mischief. 

How many times did I hear them predict that the next day would be a beautiful day, a perfect day, mild and clear, only to be subjected to a barrage of terrible weather.  Before bed, the weather man says:  great day tomorrow, great weather.  When you wake up, the radio weather guy says:  perfect day today.  And when you look out the window, it does look perfect.  So you go to work in shirtsleeves, wearing your good shoes.  You go to work by taking a twenty-five minute bus ride, followed by a forty minute subway ride, and a couple of long walks are involved.   All morning it’s a beautiful day, and you might even have lunch in the park or something.  But during the afternoon, something happens.

By two p.m. it’s cloudy.  By three p.m. it’s dark, and a wind has come up.  By four p.m. it’s raining.  By the time you leave the office at five p.m. it’s like Noah’s Ark out there, you’re walking in a driving rain and the temperature is fifteen degrees lower than when you came to work. 

It gets worse.  You’re soaked to the skin before you get to the subway, and you stand there dripping wet on the train for forty minutes.  Now you have to catch your bus.  Traffic is a mess, and there are fifty people on line for the bus, which will hold about thirty of them, if you’re lucky.  (People are on the bus already.)  More people are coming out of the subway all the time, and getting on the line.  If you try to hang back, under an awning or in a building, the line keeps getting longer and you never get on a bus.  So you must stand on the line in the rain, for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, in the pouring rain, in your shirtsleeves and you good shoes, with no umbrella, trying desperately to get home from work.  Oh yeah, New York weather is a blast.

It’s crazy how the weather comes up so quickly.  When I was sixteen years old I had a summer job working in a defense plant in our town.  I walked to work.  One morning, one beautiful morning, when the weather prediction for the day was “perfect,” I got to the gate and the guard was looking at the sky.  Somebody said, “nice day, eh?” and the fellow said, “okay now, but it’ll be fucking murder later on.”  Wait now, what do you mean?  “See that?”  He pointed at the sky.  “Pink at night, sailor’s delight.  Pink in the morning, sailor’s warning.”  We didn’t think too much about it.  The fellow at the gate had sailed the seas of the world for twenty plus years with the merchant marine and it turned out that he knew his weather.  At about two p.m. it started to storm around like nobody’s business.  Rain and wind like we thought that the windows would be smashed, and black as night. 

Anything can happen in New York, weather wise, and it probably will happen, too.

The Blizzard.  And now, the coup de grace, ladies and gentlemen . . . The Blizzard!  If you think that you like the hurricanes of the world, the typhoons, well just try them with sub-freezing temperatures, and snow instead of rain, but with the same high winds and all of that lightning, too.  Now that’s a party! 

There’s nothing like trying to make your way home by car after work, and having the time stretch way out as the snow piles up, and having to cross huge suspension bridges while periodically having to get out of the car and join a group of drivers trying to push abandoned cars aside to make a pathway, and all the while it’s snowing like mad, blown by a strong wind, and there’s brilliant lightning flashing in the sky, in the clouds and the snow, and everything is punctuated by terrible thunder.  If that’s your idea of a party, maybe you should move to New York. 

New York is a great place, no doubt.  Best museums in the world, best restaurants, best pizza.  It’s a great place for music and art of every kind.  It’s a tough place, though.  It’s very stressful, and the weather is only part of it.  “If [you] can make it there, [you’ll] make it anywhere.”  Try it if you want to.  Good luck!  I handled it okay when I was young, strong and foolish.  I wouldn’t even try it again at this point.  

Dangerous Escapades Of Reckless Boys

There was a huge building boom in the private home market after World War II.  By August, 1945 there were over twelve million people in the armed forces, and many of them had had their lives on hold for up to five or six years.   Now most of them would be coming home, and they shared a feeling that they had a lot of catching up to do.  Millions of them wanted to get married, drink as much alcohol and smoke as many cigarettes as possible, have a family, drink real coffee, eat steak and eggs, and buy a car and a house.   I was born in Queens, New York City in 1948, and I had a wonderful perch from which to watch the very last vacant lots, small farm plots (!!!) and the few remaining bits of primeval woodland in Queens fill in like the bottom of an hourglass until every square inch of raw land had been occupied by new homes.  

Children had vastly more freedom in the early Fifties than they do now, more, in fact, than was at all sensible in a place as generally unsafe as Queens.  By the age of four I was part of a wandering pack of mostly boys.  We roamed the immediate neighborhood with zero adult supervision.  Our parents trusted us to cross some streets on our own, but not others, and they trusted us to know the difference.  “Come home when the streetlights come on.”  All through my early life it seemed like there were a great number of children within a year or two of my age.  Behind the two-family house that my family lived in was a field of about one acre in size that had never been built upon.  It had been, up to that time, devoted to agriculture, of all things, someone was still growing beans and tomatoes.   I can picture it to this day.  In 1952 or ‘53 it was slated for the construction of the one-family row-houses that became a hallmark of the town in question, which is called College Point.  When they first cleared the land and prepared it for construction it became our favorite place in the world. 

Regarding “College Point,” it actually was a point of land jutting out into the East River (which is actually an estuary, and not a river at all), just east of La Guardia Airport on the north shore of Long Island (which actually is an island).  There had actually been a college there, briefly, but it had been gone for almost a century before I arrived. 

I don’t remember any fencing around any of those construction sites, although I know that many boys did actually get hurt playing around the dirt piles or the half-constructed homes.   The dirt piles!  What better landscape could an army of reckless boys ever hope for?  I recall these dirt piles being very large, but I suppose we must bear in mind that I was very small at the time.   The dirt was very loose, and the piles were very regularly shaped.  We had “dirt bomb” fights with a dozen boys on a side, hurling clods of dirt at one another.  These often degenerated into rock fights, which were much more unpleasant.  We played King of the Hill, gleefully tossing each other down the side of a pile.  We also engaged in an activity that gives me chills to this day, an activity in which many boys famously die, an activity which is one of the reasons that it never fails to amaze me that boys ever grow successfully to manhood at all.

We dug caves into these piles of loose dirt with our hands.  Caves!  We created spaces beneath many hundreds of pounds of loose dirt.  Boys of four, five or six years old, digging out chambers that were big enough for several boys at a time.  I vividly remember being inside of these places.  There was enough natural light to see, albeit dimly, so I suppose that the aperture was always fairly close by. We would just start digging into the pile and make a little chamber as soon as it seemed practical.   You needed to crawl in, though, and luckily I always got out okay and I don’t remember any collapses.  When those things come down around the heads of the occupants the result is often fatal.  Death by misadventure, I think they call it. 

For my towny friends, this all took place on 117^th Street, just south of 12^th Avenue.  The bean field was between 12^th and 14^th Avenues, and between 119^th and 117^th Streets.  118^th Street didn’t go through, because of a sudden change of grade, so sudden that it was almost a cliff.  I lived on 119^th Street at the time, close to the corner of 12^th Avenue.  There were a lot of children on 119^th Street, but they seemed to be mostly girls and their ages didn’t agree with mine.  For me, the real action was around the corner on 118^th Street, the long block between 9^th and 12^th Avenues, where there was an army of boys right around my age.  They were a great bunch of guys.  Some have been quite successful in life; a few have already passed from the scene.  Congratulations, or RIP, whichever is appropriate.

I’m only in contact with a couple of them at this point, but it’s a pleasure to remember them all.  The block itself was very beautiful, lined on both sides with huge, mature trees that blotted out the sun when the leaves were full.  Not a through street, it dead-headed on both sides, so there was not a lot of traffic.  It was a perfect place to play Hide-and-Seek, or Tag, or any of the many games that we enjoyed.  We played games that required no equipment, games that had very few rules, games that had almost nothing to interfere with the fun.   Those were good times.  I say to you all, wherever you are, that you were good, if often imperfect friends, and I remember each of you fondly, and I forgive you your imperfections.  As the three time loser said to the judge upon sentencing:  your honor, whom amongst us is perfect?  I ask you only to forgive me my trespasses, as I forgive you.  Bon chance, my friends.  I’m so very glad that we all survived those impromptu caves.  

Filthy Buggers

The earth has cooled considerably since I was a boy in old New York City.  My corner of the city was College Point, a working class, industrial settlement on the East River across the Flushing inlet from La Guardia Airport, in Queens.  The city was eighty-one percent white in those days (and I’m not suggesting that that was a good thing), and there were three professional baseball teams (that, I think, was a good thing).  There have been many changes over the years.  Some of them are discussed, but many are overlooked.  One thing that seems to go unnoticed is that urban life is much, much cleaner now.

One thing that should shock the modern observer was just how filthy our lives were in the post-World War II years.  I suppose some families had a different experience, a cleaner environment, but the town in general, the stores, the schools, the restaurants and bars, and most of the domiciles, were almost all ancient, run down, and less than clean.  Dust and grime ruled. 

My little friends and I lived a kind of “Little Rascals” existence.  Like that movie gang, we spent a lot of time well out of the range of parental oversight.  In that simpler time, parents were content to let us go “out,” and spend whole days “doing nothing.”  Much of this nothing was accomplished in vacant lots, of which there were still many.  Some were primeval, no spade had ever turned the earth there.  We played in the dirt, making battlefields for little soldiers or roads for little cars.  We played marbles in circles drawn in the dirt.  Since it was New York, there were always construction sites too, often with huge piles of loose dirt for us to get creative with.  Dirt bomb fights were common there for a while.

Do children even play in the dirt anymore?  I think these days it is considered déclassé. 

Our hygiene was less than ideal as well.  I didn’t live in a house with a shower until I was married.  As boys, we took baths, and infrequently at that.  I can hardly believe it now, but even in those beastly New York summers we took one or two baths per week, and washed our hair once a week if that.  (Recall that this was the period when most boys loaded up their hair with products that ranged from greasy [Brylcream], to oily [Vasaline Hair Tonic], to down-right gunky [Oddel’s Hair Trainer].) 

Many of us lived in homes that were heated with coal.  I lived in such a house, a “two-family house,” with a coal bin in the basement, until I was ten.  The dust got everywhere.  The landlord had to go down and stoke a furnace periodically all winter, like a boilerman on the Titanic. 

We paid quite a price for these filthy habits.  We got sties in our eyes and boils on our backs, and frequent infections of other kinds as well.  Our war-experienced doctors were very blasé about it all.  They were just glad that the shooting had stopped.  They’d give you a tetanus shot with one hand while smoking a Camel with the other, sipping scotch between house calls. 

Disease was a much greater presence then.  My own sister came down with whooping cough as a baby, we were lucky not to lose her.  I was, fortunately, in the first generation to get polio shots by age six or seven, so much of that hardship was avoided.  We did, however, all get the then routine childhood diseases, chicken pox, measles and the mumps.  Mumps, in retrospect, seems like an almost comic affliction, with the puffy cheeks and all.  The reality was much worse.  My own case came soon after the chicken pox and the measles, all in less than a year, and my resistance was low.  I was sick as a dog for more than a week, with a fever so high that it was later blamed for my sudden onset of nearsightedness.  I remember the projectile vomiting very vividly, launching baseball sized things into the bucket next to the bed.  Now most of these diseases live only in memory. 

There were the non-routine diseases too, like scarlet fever.  Many boys and girls missed an entire year of school with that. 

Most children today seem to make in through to adulthood with their tonsils intact, never having become infected at all.  Quite the contrary, most of us got that infection too, and had the tonsils removed. 

It all seems unreal to me now, like some poor, stunted earth-like civilization visited by the Star Trek crew, or a bunch of “workuses,” (work house kids, one workus, two workuses) in a Dickens novel.   But we were relatively prosperous working class kids, some quite middle-class even, and it’s not that long ago really. 

Oh, I guess it was long ago.  New York changes more rapidly than most cities, many buildings, hell, whole neighborhoods have come and gone since then.  These days College Point is home to many of the new minorities in New York, Chinese and other Asians, Hispanics, even blacks.  Did I say minorities?  Whites are way in the minority now.  I’m not complaining, it’s a good thing.  That’s been the experience of New York for all of its history.  Ethnic groups move in, move out, and shuffle around.   All of these newcomers are fine New Yorkers, and I’m sure that they make great neighbors.   The fast food is much more entertaining than it used to be too, from what I see on Facebook. 

One thing is for sure:  these new Chinese, Korean, Hispanic, black or white children have a much more hygienic lifestyle than we did.  Oh, two things:  I’m sure that they’re healthier too. 

Progress!