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.

Wonder in Bryant Park.

This season, stand in the middle of Bryant Park should you want to do a favor for yourself.

Walk through the fleur-de-lis golden gates and take in the oversized bronze lampposts, the balustrades separating the various plateaus, the monumental urns and ginger pots, the festooned grotto where William Cullen Bryant surveys it all, stroll past the little shops in their glass huts, the golden hues of their lights spreading out like candles in the dark, where the smiling shopkeeps sell the warmth of hot cider and cocoa and truffles and scarves, step up to the ice skating rink lit with blues and reds turning every turning skater rosy in the night, move towards the center and spin, take in the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Bank of America Tower, and the gold-leafed Bryant Park Hotel, and if you are particularly lucky, Harry Connick, Jr. will be singing And A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and everybody is smiling, everybody, in love, perhaps, with each other, but most certainly, in love with the night, paying no heed to the garish sun.

Remember (to spin) the Alamo!

The Alamo is a sculpture by Tony Rosenthal situated in the East Village at Astor Plaza very near the Cooper Union. Each side of the cube is eight feet long. Made out of steel, it is upended on an axis and, my favorite part, it spins! One person can manage it, two people can give it quite a whirl. It was erected in 1967, with a permit for a six-month exhibition. People loved it so much however, it has been spinning there for forty-seven years.

The somewhat square Clock in Dante Square.

The clock in Dante Square in front of Lincoln Center was designed by one of the world's most prominent architects, a man exceedingly well represented on the NYC Skyline. His name was Philip Johnson and he gave us this clock. Across the street in the New York State Theatre, one of the thee largest stages in the Quadrangle of Lincoln Center, and designed by Johnson himself. (I have to tell you I am very fond of the building for the institutions it hosts, but it is by FAR my least favorite building at Lincoln Center and perhaps Johnson's worst design. The lobby looks exactly like a cellblock at Rikers. )(I'm told.) However, I love this sleek timepiece out front, whose four points hit north, east,south, and west.

The Green Lantern, NYC-style.

The Dutch volunteer constabulary police force used to carry green lanterns on the ends of 'hobo poles' to make them visible on the dark night streets of New Amsterdam as they looked for 'thief's, petty larcenists, and pirates in the mid-1600s. During their breaks, they settled in the watch house and hung their lanterns outside so as not to bur the buildings down. Today, nearly every NYPD Police Precinct is adorned with green lanterns to lest you know they are 'watching and vigilant'.

Stones in trees and the meaning of park art.

One of the three massive and amazingly lifelike 'trees' in bronze, sprouting boulders in Madison Square Park in an installation titled "Ideas of Stone" by Giuseppe Penone. 

What does it mean? I was asked.

Hmmm. Well. The trees are so real-looking birds have nested on them. Look! But they are leafless, uprooted and dying. Real-looking bronze. And the boulders are either floating in them or toppling the branches over. To me, they heighten the feeling of life by making it feel fleeting, temporal, precarious, a boulder in a tree, frozen in time. Stop for a moment and feel the feeling of being alive. But that's just me. (They made me smile.)

The loss of Gus.

We lost Gus, the bi-polar bear, a few weeks ago at the Central Park Zoo.. He lived to be 27, but never produced any children. Known for his melancholy and obsessive-compulsive behavior, he earned one of the great nicknames in NYC History. I miss him.

NYCs Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza

The 16-foot high, 66-foot long memorial not only remembers those who died, but celebrates life for those who survived. Excerpts of 83 letters, poems and journal entries written by 65 individuals—both those who returned from the Vietnam War and those who did not—are etched into illuminated glass blocks. Alongside these personal remarks are statements by the four American presidents under whom the war in Southeast Asia was waged, and brief news clips to amplify and give context to the excerpts. Nearby, the Walk of Honor lists the names and ages of 1,741 individuals who entered the military service in NYC and were lost to the Vietnam War.

I found it at the Colony.

Colony Music is closing its doors and with it goes a door to my heart.

My first purchase at Colony Music was G. Schirmers 24 Italian Art Songs and Arias. I was sixteen-years old and studying opera at the time and over the next ten years worked my way through the entire book which is presently in my periphery tucked underneath my piano, bound together with affection and Scotch tape.

I bought the scores for La Traviata, Rigoletto, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, Tosca, I Pagliacci, Madama Butterfly, and Il Trovatore at Colony.

I tried my hand at musicals for a while, and bought hundreds of songs for auditions there after that. But as I couldn't dance very well, I never got really far at the dozen or so Broadway auditions I faked my way through. I still liked to sing anyway, and would browse the stacks at Colony just for the fun of it all, for the simpler joy of singing in an empty staircase or a closed rehearsal room.

A few years ago, I lost the hearing in my right ear. I couldn't hear myself very well any longer. I sensed I was going wildly off key. The simpler joy was sadly slightly tarnished.

So one day, I picked up a primer on the piano at Colony. My Mom had bought me a keyboard for Christmas and I taught myself some scales. More books followed and I eventually splurged on a Korg electronic piano with weighted keys. Whenever I had a hard day, I would treat myself with a trip to Colony, a three minute walk as it happens, and buy some music, my favorites like Burt Bacharach, or The Beatles, or The Complete Rogers and Hart, or something more challenging like Beethoven's Für Elise. I am not good by any measure, in any measure. At all.

But it is my happiest pass-time, buying music and making music.

I will miss Colony and Colony in particular. It had absolutely no pretense. It was a ratty, ramshackle, twisted, crowded, crazy affair. The owners looked as though they stepped out of an episode of Hoarders. They very well may have. The entire history of music seemed crowded into that corner of 49th Street. There was little rhyme or reason or rhythm to the stacks. But that was its great success. You could take your time in Colony and just look and listen and dig and make stunningly great finds. Every visit was a treasure hunt and the prize was the greatest music ever written.

You didn't have to be a star to shop in Colony. Better put, every one was a star, every one whoever allowed music to enter into their heart was a great gleaming star in Colony and the camaraderie in the cramped aisles was the camaraderie of a galaxy: We all belong here and celebrate our own particular starshine in the collected glory of all of yours. We want the best for and from each other. Competition is as pointless as a competition of constellations.

These kinds of places are disappearing all around us. And I sound old when I protest that I don't approve. But listen to your elders: Some things are worth keeping around because they make us feel better about what we can do, about what we might do, about what we dare do.

The red cube.

I was asked by my new friends from Kentucky what this sculpture meant. Like any good piece of art, it means some things, but anything at the same time, depending on you and how you experience it. On an as objective level as possible, it is red. A bold red cube surrounded by the black and grey and white buildings of the neighborhood. It is NOT a cube really, as it is extended on its horizontal axis making it soar upwards. It is poised on one of its corners, almost impossibly, somehow standing among all the solidly-footed skyscrapers around it. It is pierced through with a cylindrical hole.

I think of it as a big heart downtown. Something to remind us we are human, and imperfect, and bright, and driven to the impossible, and inspired to reach upwards and out of ourselves. We could fall at any moment, as the buildings in front of it, in fact, did in 2001. And although the heart is pierced, the hole, even in our frailty, still pulls our eye to our accomplishment above, to the sky.