BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: NEW YORK CITY

NEW YORK CITY (Circa 1000 B.C.E.)

"Some of the first humans to New York City arrive in canoes in 1000 B.C.E. , paddling across the wide river from another island (and the region that is now Brooklyn), through thick reeds to 'Mamhatta' or 'hilly island,' and its vedant forests of oaks, and trees, spruces, cedars, and pines, with tangles of blackberry, raspberry, and strawberries growing at their trunks. The local Native Americans, the Lenape, hunt deer, bear, mink, turkeys."

Prudence Pfeiffer. The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever (New York: Harper,2023)
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ENTERTAINMENT IN NYC IN 1809
 
"Already, the city was the nation's foremost destination for refinement and for spectacle, from the newly expanded Park Theater, whose domed interior was touted as resembling 'the Temple of Jupiter at Athens,' to the Corlear's Hook Circus, where 'the Royal Tiger Nero' could be seen in contest with a 'large Wild Bull, and immediately after, a large Wild Bear.'

 Elizabeth L. Bradley. knickerbocker: The Myth Behind New York
(New Jersey: Rutgers University, 2009)
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A BRIEF STROLL THROUGH GREENWICH VILLAGE

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=4252536131643038
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THE BIG APPLE

" The phrase doesn’t seem to have been intended as a nickname, however — especially since the name in question wasn’t capitalized.
In fact, it was actually a horse-racing column published by the New York Morning Telegraph that popularized the term. “The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There's only one Big Apple. That's New York,” racing journalist John J. Fitz Gerald wrote in a 1924 column eventually called “Around the Big Apple.” However, Fitz Gerald apparently first heard the term from two Black stable hands in New Orleans. As etymologist Michael Quinion explains, “the Big Apple was the New York racetracks … the goal of every aspiring jockey and trainer .. for those New Orleans stable hands the New York racing scene was a supreme opportunity, like an attractive big red apple.”
    The expression was later popularized by jazz musicians in the 1920s and 1930s, then picked up in the 1970s by president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau Charles Gillett, who began a tourism campaign around the slogan that was designed to counter New York’s rising crime rates and bad reputation, among other issues.

INTERESTING FACTS website
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The Bowery film (1933)

Directed by Raoul Walsh (who also directed High Sierra and White Heat) and released in 1933, The Bowery is an energetic, twisting, improbable, and wonderfully entertaining view of New York’s most notorious avenue during one of the city’s most exciting decades: the late years of the 19th century. The cast includes Wallace Beery, a saloon owner named Chuck Connors, and his rival Steve Brodie starring George Raft. In 1933, the same year that King Kong was released, Fay Wray plays Lucy Calhoun who, like Stephen Crane’s Maggie, is desperate and adrift in the city. Other characters have outrageous names like Slick, Lumpy Hogan, Googy, and a young Jackie Cooper playing a street punk named Swipes McGurk. "

https://www.mrstephenwolf.com/twenty-great-downtown-movies
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GRAND CENTRAL DEPOT

Cornelius Vanderbilt began the construction of Grand Central Depot in 1869 on 42nd Street at Fourth Avenue as the terminal for his Central, Hudson, Harlem and New Haven commuter rail lines, because city regulations required that trains be pulled by horse below 42nd Street.[6] The Depot, which opened in 1871, was replaced by Grand Central Terminal in 1913.

Wikipedia. 42nd Street
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GEORGE WILLIAM SWIFT TROW, Jr. & NEW YORK CITY

George William Swift Trow, Jr.,’s family called him Swift. The name fit his quickness of wit and spirit, and his grace. His friends, of whom I was one, called him George, pronounced in a descending tone as if in reference to his firmly grounded authority on subjects important to the rest of us, or not. The Trows had been in New York City for generations. When I came from Ohio, in 1974, I knew nothing about the city and had no connection to it except as a destination for ambition. In the nineteenth century, an ancestor of George’s had published what was known as “Trow’s Guide,” an early directory of the city’s residents and their addresses. Another ancestor had been on the Hudson River, in 1804, when Alexander Hamilton was being rowed back to Manhattan after his duel with Aaron Burr. George’s ancestor looked at the boat through a telescope and said, “My God, they’ve shot Alex Hamilton!” It’s not an exaggeration to say that all my visceral knowledge of old New York derives from that sentence, and from the way George said it (spoken, it doesn’t have a comma), and from other things George told me. I wasn’t a New Yorker, and George made me one."

Ian Frazier. On George W. S. Trow’s “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse” New Yorker Classics. March 2, 2025

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MY WIFE STANDS AT OUR BEDROOM WINDOW

My wife stands at our bedroom window.
Where is the moon,
What have we done with it?
It was here yesterday. Where did it go?
When you are married
For as many years as we have been
So many persons, objects,
Astronomical events become neglected.
Perhaps she is counting red taillights
Of an endless line of cars
Crawling like snail to New Jersey.
Never has the George Washington Bridge,
Next to Venus, been so far away.
Or is she straining her eyesight,
Looking for our dead son
Walking on the sidewalks,
Waving to her, 14 stories up?
What are you looking at?
Christmas lights strung
Along tops of buildings across the street.
Come away from the window.
 
No, she says, you must see this.
What? A full moon.  There.
By the water tower.
In the end, our lives
Come down to light.

Louis Phillips