BAD NANNIES

Every day in Brooklyn, the nannies are out pushing strollers that hold the children in their care.  They are ubiquitous in the parks – even in winter – and on the subways.  Hiring a nanny is a way of keeping a child at home and away from the head lice and diseases that are found in day-cares and preschools.  But, while day-cares are licensed and generally have security cameras, the nanny is a free agent.

I read the bestseller The Nanny Diaries, and while I’m sure there are indifferent narcissistic mothers like the one in that story, I wonder how most of the mothers would feel if they knew what their nannies were up to.  For example, one spring afternoon I saw two nannies with strollers parked in front of the garage door of an expensive house.  The nannies were sharing a blunt that I could smell as I rode by on my bike.  I wouldn’t want the nanny of my child to smoke cigarettes on the job, let alone marijuana.

Once, a long time ago, I saw a very famous middle-aged actor walking in a park, holding a book near his face and reading.  A toddler about two years old was trailing behind trying to keep up with the actor that I could only assume was the little boy’s father.  I thought that was sad that the little boy was getting no attention.  But now the nannies can’t put their cell phones down for a minute, unless of course, they are in the company of other nannies.  Then they talk to each other.

I was once in a store in Atlantic Mall and a nanny was shopping for clothes and talking on the telephone while the little boy in the stroller just cried and cried.  Was he hungry?  Thirsty?  Wet diaper?  He needed something, something his parents were paying that nanny to provide and she was just ignoring him.  Finally, after 30 minutes (possibly longer) I approached her and said I’d call security if she didn’t take care of that little boy.  She got all humble and sheepish and spoke in a Spanish accent, “Yes, I take care right away” and then got in line to pay for her stuff. 

The worst nanny situation I witnessed was on a train headed for Coney Island.  Two boys about 4 and 6 years old were sitting across the aisle from me.  Their nanny – blond, Slavic accent – was laying on the seat in front of them.  Cursing at them softly.  Using the F-word at these kids.  She wore a baseball cap and had it pulled down low and evidently she had serious problems.  The smallest of the boys stood in his seat and she ignored that until he fell.  She helped him up, cursing softly all the while.  I determined to find a cop as soon as we got off the train.  The parents should know and the cop would get information to let them know.  But when the train stopped she got off quickly with the kids.  I tried to follow, but when I saw a cop and when I veered off to speak to him, I lost her. 

All I can say is – check your nanny.

VANDERBILT MAUSOLEUM, STATEN ISLAND

While I was in Newport, Rhode Island, I visited a bookstore and bought a book about the history of the Vanderbilt family.  I had heard of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt who had amassed the wealth, and the Vanderbilt name was linked with rich elite, but the name was not as commonly referred to as Rockerfeller or Roosevelt so I didn’t know much of anything about them.  Perhaps if Grand Central Station had been named Vanderbilt Center, they’d still be more in the forefront.

What I learned was that Cornelius Vanderbilt was born and raised on a farm on Staten Island.  When he was a teenager, he worked a ferry service shuttling people and produce from the farms on Staten Island to various docks in Manhattan.  While continuing his ferry service, he went to work managing the steamboat service of Thomas Gibbons who wanted to drive his competition to either sell out to him or go out of business.   

Cornelius to New Jersey with his wife Sophia, also his first cousin, and she opened a profitable inn there.  For the California Gold Rush, Vanderbilt turned to ocean shipping.   Then he bought the stock of the Harlem Railroad, made it profitable, and the rest is history..

The competitiveness was passed through the generations – his grandson Cornelius II bought the block on Fifth Avenue between 57^th and 58^th Streets to build the biggest house ever constructed in the US.  And why?  Because he wanted to outdo his friends and neighbors.  By contrast, the amasser of the

Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt House
10 Washington Place, NY

wealth, the Commodore moved from New Jersey to a relatively moderate home at 10 Washington Place (torn down to build a 6-story commercial building in 1900) which is now owned by NYU.  I was there while it was being renovated and took a walk inside. 

After his first wife (Sophia) died in 1868, Commodore Vanderbilt eloped in 1869 with another cousin, 43 years his junior.  Her name was Frank Armstrong.  A year later he financially sponsored Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tinny in become members of the New York Stock Exchange.  There were rumors that Vanderbilt had an affair with Tinny, also much younger than he.  The Woodhulls made a fortune on Wall Street and started their newspaper Woodull & Clafflin’s Weekly which published the first English version of Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.  Did the Commodore read it, I wonder.

Commodore Vanderbilt donated land to the Moravian Church in Staten Island and that is where he and some other members of his family are buried.  I wanted to see it, so I took a trip over to Staten Island.  

I only visited Staten Island twice while I lived in Brooklyn.  I drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge (this is the bridge in Saturday Night Fever) just for fun and was surprised when I was charged a hefty toll to get back to Brooklyn.  The second visit, I took the ferry from Manhattan.  Staten Island doesn’t have a subway (underground), but it does have a train which I took to the New Dorp stop and walked up to the cemetery.  The feeling being there was like a fishing village.  The area isn't as densely populated or over-constructed as the other boroughs, and the feeling is lighter, newer.

I knew from the book that the Vanderbilt Mausoleum was at the rear of the cemetery and so that’s where I headed.  At the back, I passed a vaulted exit with locked iron gates and couldn’t find the Vanderbilts.  I asked some people in the cemetery and they directed me back to that vaulted exit.  That was the entrance to the Vanderbilt portion of the cemetery.  I found my way passed the gate and into a weird, silent, dead feeling.  I walked about a quarter of a mile up a narrow road, passing lots of fallen dead trees and not seeing or hearing a living creature – not a bird or squirrel – the whole way.

Vanderbilt Tomb Interior

At the top, the feeling was creepy.  The Vanderbilt Mausoleum resembles a small church with three sets of doors at the front and small vaulted windows above them.  At one time the doors were iron gates, but in the 1960s a woman pulled on the gates trying to get inside the tomb and the gates fell on her and killed her.  So, the gates have been replaced with gray steel industrial doors with padlocks.  The windows above the doors have been stopped up with concrete blocks. 

It is difficult to describe the feeling – sadness, loneliness, desolation.  But certainly the place felt empty.   I didn’t linger.  I would never want to go back there.

It was only when I was walking back down through the cemetery that I realized I was walking on the farmland where Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up.

NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND ROAD TRIP

One Christmas while I was living in Brooklyn, I rented a car and drove with my son to Newport, Rhode Island.  I’d wanted to see the summer “cottages” of the one-percenters of the Gilded Age that line Bellevue Avenue.  My interest had been captured years before when I watch a documentary produced by the Preservation Society of Newport County.

Newport is not a busy place in the winter – no regattas, no tourists to speak of – just a quiet island town with little pubs and restaurants.  It’s as quaint as an old-fashioned Christmas card, especially with snow on the ground.  We stayed on an island just off Newport and faced the town. 

Because it was Christmas, only a few of the “cottage” homes were open for tours and we chose The ^th Street.  Still standing at the southeast corner of 64^th Street and Fifth Avenue, it’s now a 9-unit coop.  The coops currently sell in the neighborhood of $25 million and rent in the neighborhood of $150,000.  Even though the front door is still on East 64^th Street, the building uses the address 828 Fifth Avenue as it is more posh.

Elms and The Breakers.  The Elms was the summer home of coal magnate Edward Julius Berwind, at one time the largest owner of coal properties in the world.  He built a 6-story house in Manhattan at 2 East 64

The Elms was built in 1899-1901 at 60,000 square feet and four stories – including the basement.  If you look at the photograph, two floors show, but there is a deceptive wall above the second story.  That wall is 8 feet high and it surrounds the servants’ quarters.  Berwind felt that servants should serve without ever being seen – except in the dining room or if specifically called into a room.  The servants could sit outside on the walkway surrounding their quarters, but should they ever be seen trying to look over that wall, they would be dismissed immediately.

The Elms had a servants’ staircase, and the chamber maids used it to get to work in the bedrooms on the second floor AFTER the rooms were vacated.  Guests might leave shoes in the hallway for buffing or clothing to be cleaned, but the servants were only allowed to pick them up at night after the guests had gone to bed. 

Deliveries to the house were made underground as well.  Coal was delivered at a door at the curb that lead to an underground tunnel from the street to the coal bins.  Food and other supplies were delivered to a covered lower driveway on the other side of the house.

Berwind’s psychology is a bit mystifying.  Perhaps seeing his servants’ lives contrasted with the splendor of the house and his life made him feel guilty.  At any rate, the tour made him very unlikable.

The Breakers, just down the street, is the same size at Highclere Castle (Downton Abbey) and was built by Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt II, grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Alice and Cornelius II had a large townhouse at 1 West 57^th Street, but feeling that their friends and neighbors might outdo them, they bought the entire block on Fifth Avenue from 57^th to 58^th and built the largest house EVER in the United States.  The house in Manhattan has been torn down and Bergdorf Goodman department store now stands on that property.  I do not know if Bergdorf’s is as large as the destroyed Vanderbilt house.

Alice and Cornelius II outdid their neighbors in Newport by building a house just over 120,000 square feet on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.  Only half of the square footage is actually usable because there is a large atrium in the center of the house with balconies on four sideson each floor.  The bathrooms are the size of a large bedroom and the kitchen is massive, and kindly, the servants were allowed to be seen.

Next door to The Breakers is Marble House, which we toured only externally.  It was built by Cornelius’s brother, William Kissam Vanderbilt who built the current Grand Central Station and his wife (at the time), Alva who was very independent and a suffragette.  She built a little tea house on the edge of the cliff and had a temporary railroad for the staff to bring all the tea and food.  The tracks were put away after tea time was over.  Well, if your husband works for the railroad…

She still owned the house when she divorced William and married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont (Belmont Stakes is named for his father August Belmont).  Belmont was a playboy addicted to gambling and absinthe.  However, along with Marble House at Newport, Alva shared a home that Belmont built there when he received his inheritance – Belcourt.  It only merited a drive-by.  

Alva continued to host afternoon teas at her little tea house on the cliff and designed a tea service with “Votes for Women” inscribed on it.  Replicas are available for sale at the gift shops in the different houses.

Post by Alana Cash

INNOCENTS ABROAD – GUILTY AT HOME

Plymouth Church was founded by 21 people in 1827 and its first minister was the fiery aboliltionist, Henry Ward Beecher.  The church is still open and operating at 124 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights.

Plymouth Church was part of the Underground Railroad and the Beecher regularly gave sermons in which he appealed for financial donations to purchase the freedom of slaves.  He held mock slave auctions and women took the jewelry off their fingers, wrists, and necks and placed it in the offering basket. 

In the 19^th century, the church was so well known throughout the country that Abraham Lincoln attended services at Plymouth Church in 1860.  His pew is marked with a plaque.  Charles Dickens gave a talk at Plymouth Church.  Mark Twain travelled to Europe for several months with a group of church members and chronicled their journey in his book The Innocents Abroad, which by the way, I highly recommend. 

Beecher’s salary was $100,000 a year – over $2,000,000 in today’s currency.  Considering that a Union solider earned $15 a month, this made Beecher quite a big cheese. Beecher’s powerful charisma especially appealed to women and he was prone to affairs with congregation members.  One affair, the one with Elizabeth Tilton, would become a public scandal and that wasn’t just because her husband Theodore Tilton was Beecher’s best friend.  How and why that scandal erupted has to do with the interwoven lives of the movers and shakers of Old New York. 

Henry Ward Beecher presided at the marriage of Elizabeth Richards and Theodore Tilton.  Beecher and Tilton together edited The Independent newspaper.  They were both ardent abolitionist speakers and sought-after on the lecture circuit – the 19^th Century equivalent of TV.  They were both out of town often, but not at the same time. 

After the abolition of slavery, they needed other causes for their zeal.  Tilton became an intense advocate for divorce reform (making it easier to obtain) and women’s emancipation.  There’s some irony here.  Beecher was also supportive of the women’s suffrage movement, but not so much in favor of divorce reform.  He also spoke out against the concept of “free love” (he was against the idea that women should be allowed to choose their sex partners) which was promoted by some women in the feminist movement of that era.  The staunchest advocate for free love, Victoria Woodhull, made note of Beecher’s feelings.

Woodhull was a barely educated entrepreneurial type who worked as a medium and magnetic healer until she and her sister met the recently widowed Cornelius Vanderbilt who set them up at 44 Broad Street as the first female stock brokers – Woodhull & Claflins Co.  Soon after, the sisters created the first newspaper run by women Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.  And, for the hat trick, in 1872, Woodhull was the first woman to run for president.

But I digress.

Beecher was used to visiting the Tilton home and it didn’t appear out of line for him to visit Elizabeth when Theodore was away.  One thing led to another as it often can, and Elizabeth eventually confessed to her husband that she’d been unfaithful to him with Beecher.   Naturally upset, Theodore mentioned this affair to his friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who relayed the news to Victoria Woodhull who took it upon herself to publish an article about it in her newspaper and label Beecher a hypocrite.  Imagine that. 

Beecher was wise enough not to sue for libel.  However, Woodhull was arrested for mailing salacious material.  In other words, because she mailed out her newspaper to subscribers, and because the article was sexual in nature, she was jailed.  When Elizabeth Tilton was questioned and confessed her affair to the police Woodhull was released after a month.  [Adding more irony to the story, Theodore Tilton is rumored to have been a lover of Victoria Woodhull during his marriage.]

It took until 1875 – somewhere in the neighborhood of seven years – for Theodore Tilton to finally sue Beecher for “criminal conversation” adultery (basically meaning debauchery of Elizabeth) and “alienation of affection.”  At the trial, Elizabeth made a short statement of confession.  Beecher, however, declared in inimitable political sidestepping, that perhaps Mrs. Tilton had sexual relations with him but he had not had sex with her.  This sounds awfully familiar.  His lawyers argued for his reputation being ruined and that should Beecher be convicted, middle class values would be thrown into chaos.  More double speak. The lawsuit ended in a hung jury and Theodore dropped his suit.

Theodore Tilton moved to Paris leaving Elizabeth to live in poverty, scorned by the Plymouth Church congregation, and buried in an unmarked grave at Green-Wood Cemetery.  Beecher lived on in the same status as before, actually got a raise in salary, and there’s a big statue of him not far from Plymouth Church on Cadman Square in downtown Brooklyn (see above).

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THE HOUSE ON CLINTON STREET

In the early 1930s, Bill Wilson was living with his wife Lois in her parents’ house at 182 Clinton Street,  Wilson had college education and served in the Army during WWI.  He had already built a successful career on Wall Street when he came up with the idea of physically visiting and researching companies to make informed stock recommendations about them.  He'd made a fortune and lost it.

During the Roaring Twenties, Wilson made his employers, their clients, and himself quite a pile of money.  The 1920s was also the time of Prohibition, yet liquor, especially bad liquor, was as profuse as ever and more enticing because one had to visit a speakeasy.  Knowing the secret code elevated one’s status – perhaps only internally.  And Bill Wilson was a terrific drunk.  When he was drunk, he wasn’t always nice.  In fact, he insulted his bosses and their clients.  He was an embarrassment to himself, the company he worked for and his wife.  But as long as he predicted stocks that soared, he was a rock star, and therefore his behavior and his obvious psychological problems were ignored.

It was a high time - figuratively and literally - and everyone, including the local paper boy, was buying stock on margin.  Having a compulsive personality, Wilson invested heavily on borrowed funds and when the crash came, his lifestyle crashed with it.  And, worse for him, he was no longer a rock star to be lauded and tolerated.  He was fired.

On account of the stock market crash, Wilson and Lois lost their upscale apartment in Brooklyn Heights and moved in with her parents on Clinton Street.  When Lois’s mother died, her father remarried quickly and moved to another house in Brooklyn Heights, leaving his daughter and her dissipating husband to live in the 4-story brick row house he’d bought as a young doctor.

Had he developed a more resilient personality, he might have found a way to rebuild a stable life, but he turned to liquor during tough times and could spend days inebriated when he suffered an emotional blow. Wilson had a lot of help to recover, and he would do that for a time, but soon he’d relapse.  He was known to pass out on Schermerhorn Street near a speakeasy and not very far from the Quaker Meeting House.  In fact, he was on the street or in alleys in so many places in Brooklyn Heights, that a “Bill Wilson Tour” could be developed.

Finally, when the hospitals couldn’t help him, his wife’s yelling couldn’t help him, his own shame and destitution couldn’t stop him from drinking, it was the talking cure that saved him – talking to another drunk who had found and kept sobriety.   That, and surrendering his arrogance in favor of humility and seeking spiritual help.  Bill Wilson stopped drinking and wanted to help others.  His initial way of doing that was to invite drunks to live at the Clinton Street house, his wife Lois becoming chief cook and bottle washer, while he encouraged and aided men to get and stay sober.  At the house they experienced the gamut from fights to theft.

Wilson had lost his business reputation and could only get temporary mercy jobs from friends.  He decided to write a book and Lois took a job.  He and Lois lived on the edge from the meager contributions of the people they were helping, until finally unable to meet their mortgage obligation, the bank foreclosed on the house. 

Bill and Lois Wilson were homeless for a year – living with friends – until someone who admired their work made it possible for them to afford to buy a house in Westchester County.  The sales from the book eventually took off and the Wilson’s were able to live comfortably without financial worries. 

The house at 182 Clinton Street is still there and has a plaque on it letting the world know that this was where Bill W. started what we now know as Alcoholics Anonymous.

Post by Alana Cash

THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE

Photo by April

Great God, the only bridge of power, life and joy, the bridge that was a span, a cry, an ecstasy - that was America.'  Thomas Wolfe

I was only on the bridge once.  Some friends were visiting from Texas and we decided to walk from my apartment east of Prospect Park down to the bridge and across into Manhattan.  We took a slightly roundabout way, walking down Washington Avenue through Fort Greene, so that I could show them some of the architecture of Brooklyn and one of the oldest schools.  A walk that would have been about five miles became six, and by the time we walked into Chinatown in Manhattan and down to the Wall Street district was quite a bit longer.  But it was worth the walk.  It was always worth it.

There we were on the top level of the bridge – the part totally given over to pedestrian traffic – with the wind coming off the river and the mystic rise of the steel cables like harp strings soaring above us.  The cathedral-like arches standing there more than a century and the wooden sidewalk like a shoreline boardwalk beneath our feet and the whole of New York Harbor in our vision.  Miles and miles of water with tankers anchored in the deepest parts, water taxis scurrying across from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and the Staten Island Ferry in the distance gliding past the Statue of Liberty.  Seagulls soaring and perched and light glinting on the windows of the buildings in all the boroughs – from this place, all five boroughs can be seen.    

Traffic, cars and trucks, cross the bridge on the level below the pedestrian walkway.  No trains cross on the bridge.  All train travel is on the Manhattan Bridge right next to it.  And actually, I preferred looking at the bridge to standing on it because any time of day in any kind of weather the bridge is beautiful to look at.  At night the string lights outline its main cables so that it’s always visible in the darkness.

Photo by Wallyg

Skateboarders, skaters, and cyclists also use the pedestrian bridge and they have the expectation that anyone on foot will get out of their way.  I was almost hit by an aggressive cyclist who screamed at me “MOVE MOVE MOVE,” then gave me the finger because I wasn’t fast enough for him.

By that time, I had lived in New York long enough to know that a Native New York bike rider would not have sounded like that.  The guy could have come from New Jersey, Illinois, or Wisconsin, but he wasn’t raised in New York City.  Not that New Yorkers aren’t rude, they sure can be, but they are so used to tourists and delays and dysfunction that the language might have been the same, but the tone of voice would have been very different, less bitchy and more dramatic, and I would have moved much faster.

But that is part of the rhythm of the City.  The millions of personalities that touch it every day.  And what I learned as I lived there, instead of just visiting, is that I must keep moving along, like the river, like the traffic on the bridge, like the subways and the escalators that descend down to them -- even when they break the feet keep moving down, keep moving.  The City feels indifferent because it keeps moving, but how else would millions of people be fed and sheltered and kept warm if the City stopped.

[Clips from Ken Burns’ documentary about the bridge can be found here:  http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/brooklynbridge/film/ ]

Post by Alana Cash

MY PERSONAL LITERARY WALKING TOUR

You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined.  You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone’s yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement.  The tree knew.  It came there first.  Afterward, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds pushed out on the windowsills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished.  That was the kind of tree it was.  It liked poor people.

                                               

Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

The NY Parks & Rec Dept has a literary tour of Brooklyn – pretty abbreviated since it focuses on Brooklyn Heights.  I never participated in it, preferring to explore further afield, and almost right away after moving to Brooklyn I took my own literary tour.  It was not to see where an author lived particularly, but to see the part of Brooklyn described in Betty Smith’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  The appeal was the reality that Betty Smith created for life in Brooklyn as she was growing up.  The richness of the weather,  cultural mix, morality, survival of poverty and rise from poverty, neighborhood streets, and a child's thoughts about all of it.  Smith's love of Brooklyn was compelling – a place so difficult, dirty, rough, vulgar, violent and scary and yet so beautiful, passionate, creative, vigorous, historic, intense and fun.  You can’t know Brooklyn from the outside or a book. I had to experience it for myself.

I reread Smith’s novel just before moving to Brooklyn and made notes of the streets so that I could pinpoint Francie’s apartment building and other places that Betty Smith describes in the book, hoping somehow to capture a sense of what Brooklyn was like in the 1940s.  That tree by the way, that Francie called Tree of Heaven, is also known as ailanthus altissima.  It is everywhere in Brooklyn.  Surviving.

At the beginning, when Francie and her brother Neeley are carrying their junk and rags to sell at Carney’s, she names all the streets they pass as they walk down Manhattan Avenue – Ten Eyck, Stagg Street to Carney’s on Scholes Street.  After selling their rags, they walked further south on Manhattan Avenue past Meserole, Montrose, Johnson, Boerum, McKibbin, Siegel, Moore, Varet, and Cook to the nickel and dime store on Broadway.  The walk Francie and Neeley took is the now in the vicinity  of the Williamsburg Public Housing Buildings (blocks of them) and about a half-mile from the Williamsburg Hassidic community.

The area is now filled with small discount stores with plastic brooms and mops in plastic buckets near the door with all sorts of plastic tubs and kitchenware in small front windows.  The tiny grocery store windows are completely covered with ads.There are little stores selling clothing, hair products and wigs, as well as a few botanicas.  It was easy to find the poverty and ugliness that Betty Smith described, as well as the cultural melting pot.  Many of the buildings were original, including the apartment building where Francie's mother scrubbed the stairs.  Looking at them -- rusty and grand -- gave me the sense of history, endurance, that permeates New York.  And like the hundred coats of paint on walls, railings, doors, the first layer is still the there.  All the layers are there – it just takes imagination to find them.

There are a few interesting things I learned in researching Betty Smith.  She didn’t finish high school and waited until her first husband finished law school before she started her secondary education and writing career.  She got divorced the year the book was published.  Although the book is about an Irish family, Betty Smith’s parents were poor German immigrants, and that change was made because the book was published during WWII.  I also found it interesting that after divorcing her first husband, Betty Smith moved to Chapel Hill, NC, home of the University of North Carolina where Thomas Wolfe went to study, much earlier in the century, at age fifteen.

ONLY THE DEAD KNOW BROOKLYN

photo by Mike Roseberry

New York has been portrayed for decades in movies and in television crime shows – from Peter Gunn with its jazzy Greenwich Village 1960s vibe (now in syndication) to Blue Bloods.  I used to see the TV production trucks in Brooklyn quiet a lot, especially Prospect Park.  It’s a lot easier to manage auto and people traffic in Brooklyn than Manhattan.  Crime shows glamorize the criminal justice system – it’s just entertainment with good guys and bad guys, just make believe.  That was my attitude until I started researching for a crime novel. 

My interest in writing a crime novel started when I met retired homicide detective Louis Scarcella at a coffee shop one morning.  He was sitting with some friends and one of them started talking to me.  They found out I was new to New York and asked me to join them again for coffee.  They were all retired from their careers, as I recall, and met there every morning. 

I like to write in coffee shops, and several days later, I met them again.  When Louie told me he had been a homicide detective, I asked if he’d be interested in helping me write a crime novel.  He agreed.  Louie, as it turned out, was one of the most decorated and lauded homicide detectives in New York City and many of his cases had made headlines.  For several months we met once a week.  He talked specifically about his cases and snitches,  and I asked lots of questions about police procedure. 

Louie arranged for me to talk to other (non-retired) homicide detectives and police officers.  Everyone had various stories and were forthcoming when I asked questions.  There was one common issue that they all spoke about – the smell of a dead body.  One retired police captain I met at Lincoln Center told me that whenever he was at the scene of a homicide, he used to take his uniform off and worked in his underwear because even dry cleaning didn’t get the smell off his clothes. 

Louie also arranged for me to visit the morgue so that I could understand for myself what they were all talking about.  Inside the building, I could smell the morgue rooms from 50 feet away, and I simply can’t describe it.  I was inside the rooms for about 5 minutes and the odor lingered on my clothes until I washed them.  I have to wonder now, what people on the subway thought about the scent as I traveled home that day.

The bodies inside the morgue were unclaimed.  These were not murder victims; they were people found in their own homes or on the street that no one had reported missing.  The morgue attendant said they would be held there for a few months, and if they were still unclaimed, they’d get buried in a City graveyard.   

The front room of the morgue held bodies on gurneys – one of them was a woman whose bloated body was a light blue.  The interior room did not have drawers, but rather stacked metal bunks.  All of them full and all the bodies were mine-shaft black.  I had seen dead bodies before in car accidents, but that was in passing, dramatic, momentary.  This was more real.  This would eventually happen to me.

I decided to research the decay of the human body and found out there’s a body farm in Knoxville, affiliated with the University of Tennessee.  People donate their bodies to science and their remains are sent to the farm where scientists put the bodies in the trunks of cars, into water, into closed containers, in plastic bags, or under a pile of leaves and study how these different elements affect the decomposition process.  They pass this information along to forensics and police labs (among others).  This type of information helps a Medical Examiner to determine time and cause of death. 

From my research I learned that as soon as the body dies, the bacteria in the stomach begin to eat away at it.  The gasses these bacteria give off rise to the surface of the skin causing the entire body to bloat and turn a beautiful light blue (whick was the stage of the female body in the morgue).  Then, as the gasses dissipate, the body begins to turn black.  During the final stages of decay the body is black as coal (bodies in the back room of the morgue had decomposed to this level).  It’s a mixture of gasses from the digestive system, various glands, as well as the decaying blood that gives such a strong, distinctive, and unpleasant odor.

About once a year when I was living in New York, a body was found in an apartment because the neighbors reported the smell.  One time the police responded to a call from a Park Avenue building and found that a woman (70s) and her mother (90s) had placed a man in a trunk after he died.  The woman explained that her husband had always wanted to visit Arizona and she and her mother had intended to send the trunk there, but they didn’t know how.  I don’t know where the trunk was sent, but the two women were sent to Bellevue.

But I digress.

After I’d learned as much about body decomposition as I could stand, I asked Louie questions about trials and testimony, he recommended that I sit in on a criminal trial in Brooklyn or Manhattan.  So I did.  The first was not a trial, but a hearing.  A 23-year old man had shot another man at a party over a girl.  The boy’s mother and younger brother (wearing red colors) were the only people in the courtroom gallery besides me.  I wondered, why did he have a gun at a party, where did he get it, when did he get it, did he always carry it.  That’s when I remembered something a cop told me once – you have to make 100 wrong decisions before you get arrested the first time.

I sat in on two criminal trials – one was the trial of a man arrested for possession of crack cocaine, the other was a trial about gang assault on a police officer.  Those trials changed my thinking forever about crime TV and caused me to lose interest in writing a crime novel.  A criminal lawyer I spoke to told me that the criminal justice system isn’t about innocence or guilt, it’s about luck.  Luck about who’s on the jury, who’s the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney and what’s going on in their private lives.  You can be innocent and go to prison.  Guilty and be set free.  Luck.  Sitting in courtrooms of the criminal trials. I came to see the criminal justice system like an amoral perpetual-motion steamroller that squashes everything in its path. 

The man on trial for selling crack cocaine was on disability and testified that he worked for cash wages fixing cars.  He had four children, two of whom lived with him.  He asked someone to babysit for him while he went to visit a girlfriend and her teenage daughter.  The mother went off to buy vodka, the daughter went off to buy a soft drink, and he went off to buy some crack – just for his own personal use, he claimed.  He wanted to smoke a woolie – crack wrapped inside marijuana.  The woman who sold him the crack only had a few rocks, which he purchased and he asked her to go get some more.  She left.  He got arrested by an undercover cop.  I don’t know the verdict, because when the trial broke for lunch, I didn’t return.  The whole story was disheartening to me.    

In the other trial, the defendants were three men (23-24?) who had gone to Catholic school together and happened to run into each other at a bar on New Year’s Eve.  At least two of them were drinking heavily.  They had an altercation with an off-duty policeman who was not in uniform.  Differing versions of how that came about from either side, but all agreeing that the fight lasted about 45 seconds.  The men, who had no criminal record, were charged as a gang because New York law reads:  A person is guilty of gang assault in the second degree when, with intent to cause physical injury to another person and when aided by two or more other persons actually present, he causes serious physical injury to such person or to a third person.

They were all found guilty and two of them sentenced to fifteen years in prison.  The other one was sentenced to one year.

I stopped writing about crime.  

Over the past couple of years, several of Louie’s arrests and subsequent convictions have been overturned  – 8 so far – and those men who were in prison have been freed and given large payments of damages from the City (over $30 million so far).  Louie has been vilified, but I wonder about the prosecutors who worked those cases and ignored the flaws.  What about farther up the chain of command?  Who turned blind eyes in order to feed that perpetual-motion steamroller of the criminal justice system?  One person didn’t create this:

http://nypost.com/tag/louis-scarcella/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/09/louis-scarcella_n_5121340.html

post by Alana Cash

BROOKLYN PROMENADE & THOMAS WOLFE

Evening is coming fast, and the great city is blazing there in your vision in its terrific frontal sweep and curtain of star-flung towers, now sown with the diamond pollen of a million lights, and the sun has set behind them, and the red light of fading day is painted upon the river - and you see the boats, the tugs, the barges passing, and the winglike swoop of bridges with exultant joy - and night has some and there are ships there - there are ships - and a wild intolerable longing in you that you cannot utter.

(from the short story No Door by Thomas Wolfe)

This excerpt from No Door seems to take place at a home in Brooklyn Heights on the palisade that faces the old docks on the East River and the skyline of lower Manhattan.  It’s the place where photographers take those panoramic photos of Manhattan for postcards and posters.  There’s a park with a wide sidewalk with benches.  You saw it in the movie Moonstruck when the grandfather took his dogs to howl at the moon. Nannies take children there in strollers and prams during the day.  Lovers patrol at night.

Of course, at the time Wolfe was describing the East River docks, there was still a great deal of manufacturing in Brooklyn, and the waterfront was much different.  There were many ships moving in and out of the docks with longshoremen on the wharves loading and unloading goods stored in the warehouses that are now renovated into condominiums.  

While he was writing the novel, Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe lived at 5 Montague Terrace, directly across the street from the houses that line the palisade (W.H. Auden lived two doors away at 1 Montague Terrace).  These houses were built by Wall Street tycoons who thought it more convenient to take the ferry to the Manhattan Battery in the morning than to drive down to Lower Manhattan from a house on Fifth Avenue. After the 1929 crash, many of the houses were abandoned, boarded up.  Brooklyn itself fell into a decrepit state and didn't recover until the 1980s.

But Wolfe was not living in Brooklyn Heights when he wrote No Door.  At that time Wolfe was living in the basement of a house at 40 Verandah Place.  The area was referred to as South Brooklyn then.  Modern realtors renamed it Cobble Hill.  Here’s what Thomas Wolfe wrote about his basement apartment on Verandah Place:

Well, you say, living alone in South Brooklyn has its drawbacks.  The place you live in is shaped just like a Pullman car, except it is not so long and has only one window at each end.  There are bars over the front window that your landlady has put there to keep the thugs in that sweet neighborhood from breaking in; in the winter the place is cold and dark, and sweats with clammy water; in the summer you do all the sweating yourself, but you do plenty of it, quite enough for anyone; the place gets hot as hell.  (from No Door)

In the photograph, you can see that the basement windows on the homes on Veranda Place are about 8 inches tall.  One hopes that the ceilings are higher because Wolfe was 6’5” and liked to stand as he wrote, using the top of his refrigerator as a desk top.

Thomas Wolfe captured New York more passionately than any writer I can imagine, describing mundane places, like the subway, with such accurate intensity that it can be felt as well as imagined:

Thus we streamed down from the free night into the tunnel’s stale and fetid air again, we swarmed and hurried across the floors of gray cement, we rushed and pushed our way along as furiously as if we ran a race with time, as if some great reward were to be won if we could save two minutes or as if we were hastening onward, as fast as we could go toward some glorious meeting, some happy and fortunate event, some goal of beauty, wealth, or love… (from Death the Proud Brother)

Thus, he engages us in the frenetic pace of the city.

The Parks Department gives literary walking tours about Brooklyn.  You can find more about the tours here:  http://www.nycgo.com/articles/brooklyn-literary-tour-nyc

post by Alana Cash

FREE SUMMER CONCERTS AND DRINKING ALCOHOL OUTSIDE IN NEW YORK

In the summer, the Parks Dept. of New York offers all kinds of free entertainment – Central Park offers Shakespeare in the Park, concerts and a one-day Jazz Festival among other events.  I went to one concert in Central Park.  It was too much like going to a baseball game with people milling around, coming and going all the time – hardly worth the effort or expense.

I much preferred the Celebrate Brooklyn! concerts at the Bandshell in Prospect Park partly because I’m lazy – this being closer to home – and mainly because this was a smaller venue. Also FREE. The Bandshell was located at 9^th Street and Prospect Park West, almost directly on the other side of the park from where I lived.  The days are really long in New York in the summer, so it was still light out when the concerts started and I rode my bike around Circle Drive to listen to the concerts from the road.  And it was perfectly safe to ride the bike back around Circle Drive when I was ready to go home

The Bandshell always had really fine artists performing [blue grass musician Rhiannon Giddens and Willy Nelson are a couple of the performers this summer] so it was really enjoyable.  The park personnel set up folding chairs roped off from the cheap seats (the grass).  They even had a seating chart, which I found amusing.    Generally the seats were filled, and there were loads of picnickers around them on blankets on the grass.  

None of the picnickers had a bottle of wine, like you might find at the Hollywood Bowl in LA, because it is illegal in New York to have an open container outside.  This includes your front porch, a backyard party, or hanging out of your own window.  Incredible as that seems, I learned about it when I got a “Summons” (a traffic ticket) once for riding my bike the wrong way on Circle Drive on a weekday at a time when the gates had been blocked so cars could not drive inside the park (Circle Drive is a one-way street surrounding the park).  At any rate, I had to appear at a special court to “answer” the Summons. 

A group of us were told to enter a room where a cop asked us if we wanted to pay the fine or go upstairs for a lecture and not pay the fine.  Those of us who were not in a hurry – which was almost everyone – chose to go upstairs.  When we were upstairs, another cop asked us what we had done to receive a Summons.  Everyone except me had violated the open container law.  One man stated he was on the sidewalk leaning on his own car.  Another said that he was at a party in a friend’s back yard and a neighbor had called the police about the noise.  When the police arrived, they told everyone to quiet down and they had to choose one person to get the Summons for the open container violation since they were drinking outside in the back yard.  I was astonished.

Here’s the best part – when the cop asked me to say what I had done and I said, “I was riding my bike going the wrong way in Prospect Park,” he said, “WHAT!”  Then, he dismissed my Summons (and everyone else’s too) and we all went home.  

Back to the summer concerts.  There were also concerts in Coney Island on Thursdays at an outdoor venue near the Cyclones Stadium.  They usually had vintage R&B bands and people actually danced.  I was only there once after spending time at the beach, and I don’t think they have those concerts in Coney Island anymore.

What they do have now at Coney Island is “Burlesque at the Beach.”  Folks take classes to learn how to perform burlesque with big feathery fans and whatnot, then at the end of their class, they perform at a sideshow on the boardwalk.  

You can find more about that here:  http://coneyisland.com/programs/burlesque-beach

post by Alana Cash