Christmas card, NYC, December, 2014.

There is a small evergreen in the churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel. Nothing much, but it stood there today on such an historic spot, in the cemetery that dates from 1766, on land that suffered two devastating city fires over the centuries, and, of course, land buried more lately under the weight of two fallen 110-story buildings that awful day in September, well, there it stood, as did I, a wee tree and me, but as it was all dressed up in lights, I felt compelled to take its picture. It obliged.

In the frame of the first photo is the tree, then the new WTC Transportation Hub by Santiago Calatrava, a few sycamore trees, the new One WTC, and the churchyard bell.

The way they all stood side by side made me happy. A new happy conversation of form and shape informing one another, informing the historic and the future, and here was I, present, a silent witness eavesdropping in the middle of it all.

I wandered through the gravestones and took the second picture. Nothing can, and this, from me, who is there five times a week, nothing can prepare one for the majesty of this new sweeping sculptural architecture. It seems impossible the way I'm sure the Brooklyn Bridge once seemed to those eyes that first fell there. And so I thought,

"My. Here, in the dead of winter, in an urban cemetery of all places, anything seems possible."

The three chapters of the Corbin Building.

The Austin Corbin Building was designed by Francis Kimball and opened on Lower Broadway and John Street in 1888. Only 20-feet across on its Broadway edge, it floats down John Street in a magnificent arcade. For decades, it held the offices of Mr. Corbin's banking interests, offices for steam pipe makers, watch makers and sellers, lighting fixture manufacturers, and, notably, diamond whole sellers.

It fell into dark times, forgotten, neglected and filthy. As the rest of the block was replaced by miserable low buildings in the 1960s, architectural critics noted it looked like a bookend holding up nothing. After 9/11, as plans were drawn up to turn the entire block into an ancillary hub to the new transportation building at the World Trade Center, the fate of the Corbin Building seemed certain: The wrecker's ball.

Fortunately, the ever-heroic New York Historical and Preservation Commission saw the diamond-in-the-rough and successfully lobbied for the building's elevated status as a cultural landmark. They succeeded. And nearly a decade of restoration began.

Look at how the thousands of pieces of applied terra cotta were cleaned and fixed, the brownstone cleaned, the cast iron window bays painted, and perhaps most triumphantly, the pyramid finials in each tower restored giving the building its original flair and pluckiness once more! 

It is a beautiful building, an arcade of Romanesque revivalism and richness, a symphony of materials, and its survival has been protected for many generations to come.

A reflection on September 10th.

After a night of nightclubbing in Lower Manhattan, in love with the city and the quiet it can surprisingly produce at 4AM, unexpected and dense like a blanket that fell from your mother's arms, I stumbled upon this view. It was the early 1990s and I was unstoppable. But these towers stopped me dead in my tracks with a mighty awe, these quiet mountains of glass and steel standing guard over the end of the island and my false sense of impenetrability. As will do the moon, sometimes things just look enormous in the night sky. And that night, these buildings looked bigger than my imagination. I felt so safe in their presence in a dark city that was in those days still a bit dodgy and dangerous.

Nobody ever much liked Towers One and Two of the original World Trade Center. The most that many could say of them was that they looked like the boxes the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings arrived in. But that is unfair. They were a benign presence of simple elegance and they defined our skyline for thirty-three years. Tomorrow, I'll remember the people. But thirteen years ago today was the last day of these buildings. And while I'm rather a cheerleader for the new World Trade Center in a much larger field of critics, today, I'll miss this view, the view of my youth, and miss these mountains that took me by surprise one night as we yielded to the unbearable morning, the twins who made me realize my place in the world, tiny and vulnerable, important, sure, but cut down to right size.

Jeff's Music Corner. Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story Suite, Joshua Bell.

I was walking around Gramercy Park the other day when I passed Joshua Bell and my mind went reeling back to this stormy night a decade ago when tens of thousands of us put our fear of lightening on the back burner, transfixed by the lightening-fast hands of Mr. Bell as we were. Leonard Bernstein had approved a violin suite for his score to West Side Story in the same year he died. I'd never heard it until this night, and rearranged as it is, one gets a new appreciation of the complexities of Bernstein's mind in the way motifs play off one another throughout. Mr. Bell wrote the cadenza and it is a dizzying piece of virtuosity. Listen right afterwards as Mr. Bell plays the first few notes of "Somewhere." A rumble of thunder swept over Central Park as though God Himself heard the strains and wanted 'in.' Who wouldn't want to play with the New York Philharmonic? It was a very special night. And here it is for you.

Jeff's Music Corner. Peter Grimes: Now the Great Bear and Pleiades from the opera by Benjamin Britten.

Should you think opera a distant conceit of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, I give you this, Benjamin Britten's dark masterpiece of 1945, PETER GRIMES. Peter is a fisherman whose apprentices have the unfortunate and careless habit of dying while in Peter's care, and this small, small-minded, gossipy town comes to life in Britten's moving and fascinating score with stunning words by librettist Montagu Slater. This particular aria, "Now the Great Bear," is a study in terror, Peter singing for his life on nearly merely one note throughout, an E, while descending harmonics in the orchestra underscore his existential plunge into questions of Fate and Determinism. Tenor Jon Vickers was the quintessential Peter (even though it is rumored Benjamin Britten rather disliked his interpretation!) and his performance almost singlehandedly brought this opera into the standard repertoire. It is difficult to pull off this very modern anti-hero with any kind of honesty while making an audience care for him. I think Vickers straddles this delicate balance brilliantly. And he is a consummate musician. Listen as he creates a veritable auditorium in his mouth, placing the voice up front and directly dead on in the mask while lifting his soft palette into a cavern of resonant sound, most especially at around 1:32. I'm including the lyric below because it is one of the densest poems I have ever encountered in opera. How smart to have the melodic line subordinate to these heartbreaking words.

Now the great Bear and Pleiades
where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds
of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher
In storm or starlight
The written character
of a friendly fate
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's
bewildering
Like a flashing turmoil
of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again? 

By the way, PBS just recorded the new production by the English National Opera, and it is a smashing version. Stiuart Skelton has one of those once in a lifetime voices of richness, power, and clarity and I love his performance, a man who doesn't need an orchestra to have a thousand overtones ringing through the room.

Jeff's Music Corner. Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3.

Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is famous, of course, notoriously difficult, a favorite at competitions for the virtuosity that must be displayed. But most importantly, it is achingly beautiful. There are many remarkable recordings, perhaps the best by Horowitz with the New York Philharmonic. You can hear Rachmaninoff himself play it with the Philadelphia Orchestra. But this concert by Martha Argerich has always been a personal favorite. She is powerful and expressive, exacting and judicious on the pedal, and it is fun to watch her succumb to what every pianist does when climbing this Mount Olympus of concerti--she mumbles to herself. She tackles the cadenza at 11:05, the huge ten-fingered chords, in spectacular rapid-fire succession with gusto leaving even her conductor smiling in awe. (It is fun to note that Argerich and Ricardo Chailly were probably dating at the time.) She has precision and grace and fire and, yes, ice.

When you've the time, listen to the entire performance. But for now, at least listen to the First Movement. I always think of it as a battle of two melodies. It begins with the sad little Russian peasant tune that breaks free in a whirlwind of variations. Then Rachmaninoff introduces the second melody in fractures, giving us glimpses of it for the next twelve minutes, turning it inside out and upside down, each time you hear it think he is fully realizing it, but he is not. When he finally gives it its full voice, its due, its moment at 12:40, it feels like redemption, like the glory of the simplest moment in the history of the world. Sometimes, I can't even take it, it's so beautiful.

Jeff's Music Corner. Shostakovich - Piano Concerto No 2 Op. 102, II. Andante

I love me the Russians. Their sweeping lush harmonics are rooted in centuries of folk temperaments, of peasant misery, of lone survival in a mass of humanity. The dotted eighth notes in the first measures take me on a trip to the Urals, and the thirds and fifths in triplets set against eighth notes play at my hidden heartstrings. The progression at bar 77 in transcendent. This is not nearly the most complicated Shostakovich, but if you're just meeting him, this is a sweet sweet spot to jump off. 

Jeff's Music Corner. Arturo Márquez - Danzón No. 2

Laurence Olivier said that we wouldn't get people into the theaters until we made them as exciting as football. And that is what Gustavo Dudamel is up to here; on display, the starry fireworks of his Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. When this was recorded, the average age of the musicians was 18 years old, yet they'd all been playing together for at least ten years already. Their fun is infectious, and they also get my vote for the sexiest symphony orchestra alive (with the exception of the bands to whom I've had the good fortune to give tours). The Danzón No. 2, inspired by the national dance of both Cuba and Mexico, and popular as well in Puerto Rico, starts off is a simple melody played first by the clarinet, then brought into laser focus with the oboe. The instruments respond to one another throughout the orchestra in all kinds of wonderful variations and dynamics and finally rendered romantically by this particularly large string section at 4:58. At 6:19, all hell breaks loose and I defy you to watch this and keep still. It is crazy joy and I wish I could bottle it. I turn to this whenever I'm feeling moody blue because this is all kinds of yellow sunlight. It is a soccer match. I wish I was smack in the middle of this orchestra. But I'd watch them from the stands in a fluttering heartbeat. Enjoy.

Jeff's Music Corner. Mahler - Symphony No.1, III, Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen

Perhaps never has the battle between life and death been waged more musically and effectively so than in Mahler's Titan Symphony, his first, and particularly here in the third movement. A funereal march begins dirge-like in the drums, and the familiar strains of Frère Jacques are picked up scratchily between the strings, mocked by the bassoons in a round and set in a disconcerting minor key. Like an embattled ray of sunshine, however, a little boy meets the march in a merry martial tune at 1:21, our friend the oboe singing his little sailor song head on against the march. Mahler, like most of the Romantics and post-Romantics, relied heavily on his cultural roots and folk traditions to make his sweeping melodic gestures and here, at 2:47, a Klezmer band meets the march, and then at 3:14, another! A minor skirmish, a happy battle of Jewish folk tunes ensues, lushly in the strings, giddy in the oom-pah-pah drums. But while Death may have taken a holiday, it infects the melodic lines and all turns minor. A lovely lilting Viennese tune breaks out at 6:00; life wants to live of course, and we are swept up in the now, savoring the time signature, living in the moment. Always lurking is Jacques, though, the sad sleeping brother, who brings the movement to a solemn sober conclusion.

This performance is crisp and fine under the precise baton and hawk-like eye of Christoph Eschenbach.

Jeff's Music Corner. Barber - Canzonetta for Oboe & Strings, Op. 48

I think this best illustrates why Samuel Barber touches a part of me that, what, I don't want to know very well. The strings at the top are so sad but the oboe, alone, sweet and silly, forges on above them. Barber composes simple acts of bravery. And it is sublime and frightening. 

The first three minutes are as perfect as any three minutes I've ever encountered.

An ado in Central Park.

I very rarely see productions of plays I have myself once been in because I know them too well to enjoy them, because I am jealous by nature and hate that I haven't been cast in this one, but mostly because I get hit with the longing for what the French poet Villon called "les neiges d'antan" or  "the snows of yesteryear." Luckily, my career has not been so huge that this has much curtailed my theatre-going. But it almost did tonight, that, and a bout of bronchitis I'm just getting over. But because my friend Kate DeWall, who was an intern what seems like just the other day and is now Master Electrician for The Public Theatre's legendary Shakespeare in the Park, invited me to tonight's closing performance of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, I said yes.

Seeing a production in Central Park normally means waiting twelve hours in all kinds of weather on a sometimes festive, sometimes furious line to obtain one of the 1600 free tickets they dispense to each performance. Sometimes, they run out before they get to you and you are rewarded with nothing for your troubles. Sometimes, you wait the twelve hours, get your ticket, and the performance is cancelled by a thunderstorm, as it was twice this week. To walk right up to the Delacorte Theatre without having waited one second and see my friend who handed me my ticket was the first delight of the evening.

When I played Benedick, I was far too young, a freshman in college in my first Shakespeare play. These many years later, and on the most beautiful evening I can recall, the air the same temperature as my skin so it seemed I was one with the night, we all were, not knowing where each of us began and the others of us ended, swimming in each other, my heart ran a slight chill, the snow that capped a realization that I am now too old to play Benedick. But the stars came out up above and down below, seated near Zachary Quinto and Lucy Liu, and the accomplished director of the show, Jack O'Brien as we were, and the most Italian production I have ever seen the few times I have of a play that takes place in Italy began like a wash of warm Tuscany, complete with tinny melodic mandolins on a spectacular set of an Italian villa lit beautifully, to perfection, with the help of my very own friend.

The cast included Broadway powerhouse performers like Brian Stokes Mitchell and John Glover. But also a lot of movie and TV personalities, including Pedro Pascal, Lily Rabe, and, playing Benedick, Hamish Linklater. In NYC it is less likely one becomes famous merely on their looks and all of these actors have the chops or at least the good guts to take on Shakespeare. And as the play unfolded, none disappointed me, many thrilled me. They bit into the text with a particularly American bent, Shakespeare, of course, transcending dialect. It wasn't until I developed a cramp that I realized my left hand was in a knot. 

I didn't want to like Hamish Linklater, and at first, I'm not sure I did, a few of his flourishes ringing false to me, his bravado, unearned, I thought.  It took the spasm in my arm to a let me to the fact that I was at odds with myself, that he was utterly charming me, and that it was time to let go. Of the snows.

Here we all were, nearly two thousand of my fellow New Yorkers and my friends Kate and Kayliane and Cort in a sweet spot of a clearing in the park on a perfect night, everyone pumped and psyched to see Shakespeare, all of us laughing, guffawing, groaning, rooting, cheering, even weeping for a moment or two, the sadness of a funeral, the exquisite music written for this production ringing through the trees and off Belvedere Castle in the distance, William Shakespeare, dead for centuries, had turned us all into his Groundlings at The Globe once again, his poetry dripping off the tongues of some of America's most accomplished actors and thawing in my mind the memories of my youth, hey, Hamish, I got a laugh there decades ago, my friend, ha ha, but you are wonderful, dear boy, just delightful, all of you simply delightful and near the end, during the death scene, as the little ensemble broke into a bit of my favorite verse in the entire canon, accompanied by a lushly sad tune and the words, "Pardon, Goddess, of the night, those that slew thy virgin bride," I kid you not, a shooting star burst through the sky above and my heart nearly burst out of my chest.

This is one of the reasons I live in NYC. And I regret none of it. 

My Willa.

Willa Cather was born in Virginia but spent her formative years on the plains of Nebraska where the drama of the landscape and the pragmatism of prairie life mingled in her mind. She set out to become a physician, an unusual pursuit for a young woman at the turn of the last century, but her gifts as a writer were obvious at a young age and she switched her major to English at the University of Nebraska. After moving back east, she wrote for journals, newspapers, and magazines for ten years in Pittsburgh, PA, home to my favorite female authors, before moving and settling for the rest of her life in NYC, in Greenwich Village at the age of thirty-three. Here she wrote her masterpieces, Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, much of it on Bank Street where you can still see her home. Her work is full of wistful romanticism flavored with an unusual economy, the hallmarks of her life in Nebraska, and while she produced quite a bit of verse, it is the free-form flowing prose-poetry I highlight here, a bit of wonder from My Antonia.

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Hughes and Poem.

Born in Joplin, Mississippi, you cannot talk of Harlem without talking of Langston Hughes. The Harlem Renaissance was nearly his invention, he certainly was its greatest voice, and he sought to give African- and Caribbean-Americans a similar voice, one without self-hatred, fear, or shame. He wrote columns, novels, and plays, but I love him for his poems, many short, some epic, all empowering. He inspired his contemporaries like Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Thurston, and Aaron Douglas and many foreign authors including black writers in French-speaking Africa. He discovered Alice Walker. Published often in The Crisis, the official literary magazine of the NAACP, he is most known for The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Weary Blues, Let America be America Again, and Harlem, What Happens to a Dream Deferred? But it is the short poem below that took the wind out of my sails one day and I've never been quite the same since. It says nearly nothing, but because it is so specific, a moment we've all experienced--a poem about not having the words to write a poem--that it says everything to me, the bravery of a heart that puts a friendship in a box on a shelf because the silence is far more powerful than the poem. That is a courageous writer. And every time I encounter this piece, part of me cracks with a perfect sadness.

Poem.

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There's nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began--

I loved my friend.

Poe, alone--

Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem below at the age of twenty, upon the death of his stepmother who raised him, on the very verge of his move to New York City. Poe was a haunted man, and the deep wellsprings of his passions were tightly wound around a moroseness and longing he harnessed with the exactitude of his verse. See how he breaks up the lines here, tearing apart his own meter he had perfectly established. The effect is as isolating as his words, as isolated as his heart. Poe was born in Boston, raised in Richmond, attended UVA and West Point, wrote Israfel, To Helen, and The City in the Sea in NYC, moved to Philadelphia, and wound up wandering a street in Baltimore where he was hospitalized then died, all and by the age of forty. But not before inventing the detective novel, some precursors to science fiction, and penning some of the most widely-read better-known and hauntingly beautiful American poetry.

Alone.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —
Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still —
From the torrent, or the fountain —
From the red cliff of the mountain —
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold —
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by —
From the thunder, and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view —

Milay.

While many places may claim her, her birthplace in Rockland, Maine, her childhood home in Camden of the same state, Poughkeepsie where she wowed them at Vassar, even Paris where she made a splash, we, here in New York, sing her praises perhaps the loudest, the city where she wandered Greenwich Village at the height of its Bohemia, and produced some of the loveliest poetry and in particular the most splendid sonnets in the English language, certainly the American canon. I love Edna St. Vincent Millay for her complicated heart. Hers was raw and fierce and brutally honest. As wonderful as life was, it was a painful affair to be sure, and as full as life was, it was unfair that it be snatched from even anyone in death. She lived by Thomas' words, raging against the dying of the light. In the poem below, she turns beauty on its head and I understand the terror of a brightness so brilliant that it blinds, the darkness in the light, an unrequited, thwarted love, the foul fairness, the poisonous libations that both beckon and maim:

When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause; and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.

Whitman.

I brought my new friends to Brooklyn the other day, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge in the shadow of two massive monuments, the bridge itself and Walt Whitman's newspaper the Brooklyn Eagle. The Fulton Ferry Landing is quiet anymore to the traffic of steamboats, but alive with New Yorkers, Americans, and international travelers longing for the view. The new fences that try to hold this humanity back from the East River are wisely adorned with Walt Whitman's words, our greatest poet I think, our American myth-maker. The myth of cities never so clearly rendered throughout the centuries, Ur, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, have never been glorified and rarified so tenderly and courageously as Whitman tenders New York City. Read his stirring words as I did again on the fence just the other day, and get a glimpse of why we love the idea of city where every single corner and every single moment vibrates with possibility:

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me;
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta!—stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house, or street, or public assembly!
Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!
Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
Play the old role, the role that is great or small, according as one makes it!

All hail the Municipal Building.

The City Beautiful movement was an urban planning model that swept the US in 1890, a response to the overcrowding of tenements and the burgeoning skyscrapers of NYC and Chicago especially. Its proponents heralded a return to classicism and studied French and Italian Renaissance architecture at L'École des Beaux Arts in Paris. They hoped that a beautiful city would promote civic pride and civic virtues, and lend order to the chaos of unprecedented population growth. Marking the end of this movement was the construction of NYCs Municipal Building.


New York City incorporated all five boroughs in 1898. Overnight, the city grew five times over and was desperate for the office space to keep this megapolis running smoothly. After coming in second place in the international competition to build a new Grand Central Terminal, the firm of McKim, Meade and White won the commission this time around and proposed a 40-story tower. It is pictured here going up and completed in its early years.

When I cross Chambers Street, this new Colossus never fails to catch my breath and capture my imagination. Built rather like a Roman Column in three phases, base, shaft, and capital, this building incorporates French and Roman Imperial elements: An 'Arch of Constantine" flanked by a colonnade announces the entrance, a Guastavino-tiled vaulted ceiling, an echo of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, leads to a subway station, the first building to incorporate a subway station in its design. A U-shaped facade soars up to the pinnacle. 

At the top, a multi-drummed tempietto rises in stages of Corinthian columns leading the eye to a 25-foot gilded statue, Civic Fame, the third largest statue in Manhattan and the highest. Surrounding the tower are four other gothic-like turrets representing the four other boroughs being tied to Manhattan.

It is a magnificent building, copied the world over, and particularly badly in the former Soviet Union where Josef Stalin, having stolen the design on a trip to NYC, had no less than seven of them built, known as the Seven Ugly Sisters. But whenever I pass ours, or on the few occasions I've had to go in, I feel particularly proud to be a New Yorker. The City Beautiful movement weaves its spells on me and my civic virtue exactly one hundred years later.

The old Hotel Astor.

As I look out my living room window eastward, down the block is the somewhat uninspired Minskoff Building, a tower recognizable for its fins at the top. But until as late as 1967, that view would have been of the second-empire Beaux-arts bubble of a building called the Hotel Astor, built in 1904, with its copper mansard roof dotted with rows of ox-eye windows, elaborately-themed ballrooms, rooftop gardens, and exotic restaurants, it brought elegance to the backwater that was once Longacre Square before it was Times Square, and built right out to the street side lending a bit of claustrophobia to the later years of its life in the growing neighborhood, in the neighborhood that fell down under its watch, and so, it had to go. It did have to go. It had nothing to do with what Times Square is today. That's ok. But it's fun to remember.

The old Waldorf Astoria.

Designed by Henry Hardenbergh who gave us The Plaza and The Dakota, the Waldorf Astoria sat on 34th Street and 5th Avenue. It was a fantasy of a building, like a chateau in the Loire Valey, like a castle on a hill in Bavaria, like a Russian Orthodox temple in Odessa. Hardenbergh used elements of Beaux-arts ornamentation, Ottoman onion domes, and gothic length to give us this eye candy that was obsolete in thirty-six years. Astounding. The wealth moved uptown, leaving the Waldorf Astoria in the dust, the same dust that would give rise to the Empire State Building that sits on the site today.

The old Grand Central.

The predecessor to Grand Central Terminal, this was a building reminiscent of The Louvre for its enormous mansard roofs, it's heavily articulated rusticated cornices, the ornate clock faces, and the delicate grille-work. Designed by John Snook whose cast-iron warehouses, department stores, and office building still dot SoHo, this building remarkably, stood only for thirty-two years.

The old Met.

Critics called The old Met "The Yellow Brick Brewery" for its industrial look sitting where it did at Broadway and the whole block between 39th and 40th Sts. in the middle of the Garment District. Opened in 1883 with a production of FAUST, it was gutted by fire just a few years later in 1892 and the interior rebuilt under the artful eye of architects Carrere and Hastings. This is The Met most people remember, with it's golden proscenium inscribed with the names of six composers, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Gounod, and Verdi. New Yorkers regularly saw enormous set pieces on the street at the back of the theatre. It was clearly not big enough to be a world-class modern opera house. After several proposals to move The Met to Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle, The new Met opened at Lincoln Center in 1966 and The old Met was razed the following year.

The Grand Central of the 21st Century.

The World Financial Center is an absolute mess and I was angry and frustrated trying to get around what has to be the craziest construction project in the world when suddenly I found myself in the newly opened underground concourse of Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center Transportation Hub and I cursed myself for ever complaining. It is mind-blowing in its beauty and will eventually lead to his masterpiece of a building, what I previously thought was his whale bone, but is, in fact, based on a boy releasing a peace dove, a spectacle of a building, in flight if you will, with a retractable roof that will open every September 11th.

Celebrating Ruby Dee.

She won the Emmy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors' Guild, SAG Lifetime Achievement and Kennedy Center Honors Awards. Out of her hundreds of performances from Cordelia in LEAR to Kate in SHREW to her Oscar nominated role at the age of 83 no less in AMERICAN GANGSTA, it is perhaps her legendary performance in A RAISIN IN THE SUN that is burnished in my brain whenever I invoke her name, that, and her epic relationship with fellow actor, poet, playwright, activist Ossie Davis. They did it all. Friends of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, they were at the very center of America's civil rights movement and did much to develop America's conscience through their own metier in the arts.

She was a NYC actress, through and through.

I remember her popping on to the big screen in Spike Lee''s DO THE RIGHT THING and thinking her breathtaking beauty was an inside job that radiated out of her and that we need not butcher ourselves with plastic surgery, but yield with grace to time the way she did. She taught us how to grow up by growing old like a good wine or a priceless violin.

We lost her at 91, a grand life, well lived, but it is raining outside early this morning in midtown Manhattan and that is exactly how I feel as I ruminate the loss.

How now, Claire Tow.

I promised I'd reserve judgement on the Claire Tow Theatre, the experimental lab and off-off-Broadway space that is perched atop Eero Saarinen's glass and marbled temple of serenity called Lincoln Center Theatre, until it was finished. I was wary, I'll be honest. One doesn't improve Saarinen, who gave us the perfection of the St. Louis Arch.

I am happy to report however my hearty support for Hugh Hardy's somewhat industrial-looking rooftop space, a space of tubes and wood and of all things, grass, as though this was the very human spot of simple materials that gave birth to the art that might eventually be enshrined in the marble down below. In one building now exists a Broadway, an off-Broadway, and an off-off-Broadway theatre and given one routinely pays one- to three-hundred dollars for a ticket in the other major spaces at Lincoln Center, the $20.00 tickets at the Claire Tow do much to further the recent mandate by he artistic community to make all arts in NYC more egalitarian and accessible.

Lincoln Center is one of my favorite places in the world. And it just got even better.

We will miss you and remember you, all of us who pass through Times Square.

Glenn McDuffie, the mad bandit kisser made famous by Eisenstadt's LIFE Magazine photograph the day WWII ended has passed away at the age of 86. It was only twelve years ago that his identity was confirmed by an anthropologist who matched hundred of photos of Mr. McDuffie with the musculature and features of the man many claimed to be them.

But Mr. McDuffie gained some notoriety for his 62-year wait, and died content to know he was the man responsible for the outburst of joy that so captured the moment of the country at large, the relief that the killing would end, the spontaneous gesture of affection with which we all can identify.

He was changing trains in Times Square to meet, of all people, his girlfriend in Brooklyn. When he heard the news, he leapt out of the subway and caught the eye of the pretty nurse beaming with the same kind of explosive emotions. They locked gazes, locked lips, and locked themselves in our collective hearts for eternity.

We thank you for your service, Mr. McDuffie, we thank you for gracing Times Square with one of its most iconic moments, and we wish you bon voyage with a tear and a very fond farewell.

The Seeger River, turn turn turn.

Many people ask me who was responsible for turning NYC around after its plunge into bankruptcy and despair, neglect and unfettered crime, a brokenness that seemed unfixable in the 1970s. There are several answers. Mayor David Dinkins took on crime like no one had before. Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch wrote A CHORUS LINE and Broadway became relevant again, a must-see destination. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani implemented the Broken Window Theory and residents took pride in their own neighborhoods. And of course, as I'm always ranting, the artists invaded the neglected corners of the city and infected them with enthusiasm and joy.

This is an incomplete picture.

No one, no person, no group, no theory, no police force was more responsible for the resurrection of NYC than the man we lost today. Many years ago, Pete Seeger built a sailboat and sailed it up the river that was brown. He'd stop on shorelines and give concerts and instruct the audience that the river was our blood and we must clean it or we would not survive. So we did. And the Hudson River became clean. And the fish returned. And the city reflects the green and blue waters that now surround it. So important was this man to NYC that I propose we rename the Hudson River the Seeger River. And I propose we sing his songs today, at least once a day, forever, because no sweeter soul ever walked our streets and no kinder man ever sung about social injustice and no better man ever made our city great.