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.
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.
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.
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 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 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'.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes weeks go by when I don't see this perfect gem of a building at the crossroads of no less than four different neighborhoods: SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy and TriBeCa.
The Old Police Headquarters is a masterpiece of the drama of the Baroque and the stateliness of the Edwardian. It takes up an entire block and one must seek out a view, often hidden by surrounding subsequent buildings, of the treasure at the top: A copper-clad dome of such exquisiteness it reminds one of St. Paul's Cathedral in London or Castle Howard in Yorkshire.
The five-story limestone edifice is a feast of cornices, columns, balustrades, clock faces, finials, pillasters, but designed by the firm of Hoppin and Koen with such Palladian proportion that none of it seems overdone or out of place.
When it opened in 1909, it was meant to impress both policeman and prisoner with the majesty of the law. The basement included a pistol range. But in 1973, the NYPD moved out of the building leaving its fate in the balance. Fortunately, the Landmarks Preservation Society saved the building which was converted into 55 luxury apartments in 1987.
The last listing I saw for apartments:
2-bedroom apartment for rent at $7,000 - $11,500 per month
2-bedrooms for sale at $1,050,000 to $1,500,000
You pay for luxury, even on the corner of four neighborhoods.
One of the reasons I love living in New York City is because Leonard Bernstein lived right up the block. And right up the block they filmed the location shots for his masterpiece, WEST SIDE STORY. When WEST SIDE STORY opened, most people complained as they left the theatre that none of the songs were "hummable." What a window into how far ahead of his time the Maestro was, as it is now one of the most recognizable scores in the world.
Listen to his "Tonight":
What might have easily been a pedestrian, conventional love ballad, he underscores with breathless syncopation and our hearts flutter along as these two infatuated youngsters fall in love on a fire escape. The key shifts wildly, keeping us off balance, and each verse ends in an ominous minor key foreshadowing the star-crossed nature of a fleeting romance. It is the musical equivalent of pure joy, with the haunting notion ever present that all of this might not last or end well. Pay special attention to the young Sondheim's lyrics here. They are pitch-perfect for this song, the youth, the vigor, and the sweet, almost inarticulate ways a drop-out gang member and an immigrant dress-maker might describe their indescribable feelings. "With suns and moons all over the place." "Today, the world was just an address, a place for me to live in, no better than all right. But here you are, and what was just a world is a star."
While Bernstein was writing this score, he was simultaneously writing his opera TROUBLE IN TAHITI, a sad story loosely based on the demise of his parents' marriage.
Think of "Tonight" and all of its breathless promise, now listen to TROUBLE IN TAHITI; Scene 4 (from 0:00 to 2:40):
Achingly beautiful, about an aching subject: A duet sung apart, a couple utterly lost to themselves and to each other. Alone, together. It is a duet of regret, of pointless lies, and running through all of it is an unlikely strain of hope. I think that is what I most admire about Bernstein, that he tenders hope among the hopeless, that he tempers ecstasy with restraint if not sadness. The sweep of this score is monumental, funereal, a requiem of the highest calibre. It is almost inconceivable that Bernstein was capable of such emotional breadth during the same period in his life.
Bernstein was a deeply spiritual man, and drew from his Jewish background and his profound curiosity in Christianity to give us both the CHICHESTER PSALMS and, under commission by Jacqueline Kennedy to open the theatre in her husband's name, his MASS.
Listen to his "Adonai-ro-i:"
Bernstein's gift for melody is all over this piece. Like any good artist, especially any good artist of the late 20th Century, he understood that less is more. This is a simple melodic line rendered lush by the harmonics, and surprising by the occasional flight into the atonal. The harsh staccato section is battled into submission, bathed and washed and cleansed by the return of his stunning and now fully realized melodic line at the end.
And, out of all the transcendent music in MASS, I choose the finale for you:
It is a synthesis of all the themes he has introduced earlier in the score. It builds from the simple song we heard earlier, now sung by a boy, and builds into a canon of glory, of praise, of celebration. Allow yourself to be swept up in Bernstein's gradual rise, let your emotion soar with this score the way it inevitably will if you simply let it wash over you. And feel the enormous peace, perhaps, certainly the peace I feel every time I allow myself the privilege of listening to this.
I've written and often that Leonard Bernstein will be revered by future generations in the way we revere say, Brahms and Mahler and Stravinsky. We don't quite yet. Because he is still mortal to many of us the lucky who lived while he did. But as he passes further into the past, he will pass deeper into our collective psyches. And his music will move us in deeper ways, this man, this genius, who could score the feelings in our hearts, the specific pains and joys, the ordinary and extraordinary, and make us feel things we didn't even know we were capable of feeling.
I live down the block from where he wrote this music. And sometimes, I have to pinch myself.
You, who dominated the skyline of the world for forty-three years, you, who are often called the most recognizable building on Earth, you, who took a punch from a plane in 1945, you, you are my champion.
I think of you gracefully tossing your crown downtown as the first World Trade Center went up forty-four years ago. You had worn it well for decades. And it was your time to sit in the shade of another building or two while still holding onto our hearts like a beloved elder-statesman.
When we watched in horror as The Twin Towers came down, perhaps our only consolation was that you, dear friend, were still safely standing up on 34th Street, and ready to bear the weight of our grief and affection, your head lit up proudly and nightly in the festive colors of the seasons, as we crowned you once again with a smaller coronet, no longer King of the World, but King of NYC most certainly, our Kong, and there you stood guarding us like a kind father while we collected our shattered selves and found the courage to reach for the sky once more.
Then yesterday, you did the extraordinary. You tossed your crown back downtown again. Who does that? Who has the humility and wisdom and graciousness to sit back in the shade twice in their lifetime? You do, my hero.
Yesterday, One World Trade Center became the tallest building in NYC, on its way up to becoming the tallest building in the United States of America. It will have its day and many more in the sun. But this week, I think of you, my forever friend, the building that tells me I'm home as it is always you, the first friend I look for whenever I return.
Thank you for carrying us through the darkness with dignity. You are our older King, but beyond that, you are our Emperor. You are the Empire State Building. And no one will ever take that from you.
Pier 54 in its heyday, with the RMS Lusitania in port.
All that remains of Pier 54, the iron arch, where New Yorkers once waited to greet the RMS Titanic.
There have been a number of days of great sadness for the people of New York City. But giving a tour yesterday on the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic moved me in unexpected ways.
Standing in front of the White Star Offices with my new friends from Washington and California and Kentucky, I could almost taste the desperation of the families storming the building as word trickled in and painfully slowly of those we lost that terrifying night, in the cold, off an iceberg miles from the coast of Newfoundland.
Isidor Strauss, the owner of Macy's Department Store, was found floating lifeless in the frigid waters. His wife, Ida, who had made it on to a lifeboat only to get back on the Titanic when she saw they weren't allowing her husband to go with her, was never seen again. John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest man on board, the scion of the oldest monied family in NYC, was also found dead in the water, his face blackened by the coal of one of the famous funnels that had snapped from its tethers and crashed onto those desperately trying to stay afloat. But the great majority of the victims were those third class passengers, the immigrants like our own ancestors, whose hearts were filled with hope of life in a new land where hard work might one day pay off, where their children might one day own a home and have an education. Simple dreams, dashed at sea.
I thought of the people that lined the Hudson River up to the White Star Pier at 14th Street, only to see the SS Carpathia arrive with the small fraction of survivors and a larger hold filled with bodies that did not survive, to be laid out on the floor of the ballroom of the Jane Street Hotel for identification. I thought of the days and weeks of confusion as misinformation gave many false hope, that perhaps the Titanic survived and was being towed to Virginia, a story that gained much traction in the minds of those family members who would do anything to keep their hope afloat.
I thought of the sad fact that there are no more survivors of that terrible, terrifying night alive anymore, those people who lived out their lives with the knowledge that they were somehow lucky beyond lucky, that fate had passed over them for the time being, that their stories would be mangled by newspaper men and The White Star Lines' official version of the events, tainted by a company hoping to avoid prosecution. But this was the end of the fabled White Star story. And the stories of the victims would eventually be heard.
It was also the end of a world as we knew it. The inequities of the class system that caused the disproportionate death of the poor that night would not go unnoticed. It was, perhaps, not a coincidence that this event led to the downfall of the greatest dynasties Europe had ever known, and that we would soon plunge headlong into a War of the World. Systems broke down everywhere, and in many cases, for the better. Most certainly not always, but often. The sinking of the Titanic heralded in a Century of Death and rivers of blood would spill in the hopes of creating a fairer world. Much of that carnage was by design. But it all began with a rather coincidental run-in with a piece of ice that had broken off an ice field eighty miles away on a crystal clear night at the height of man's sense of invulnerability.
We are vulnerable now. We always have been. But it took this titanic event to remind us. And remind us again 100 years later.
The original plans for Rockefeller Center included as its centerpiece a new Metropolitan Opera House. But after the stock market crash of 1929, those plans were abandoned and The Met would not find a new home until 1966 at its resplendent palace in Lincoln Center.
Left with an open axis that separated the British Empire Building from La Maison Francaise, seasonal gardens were designed, installed, and named for the body of water that separates England from France: The Channel Gardens. At the foot of the gardens was to be a sunken piazza dominated by a major work of art. The Rockefellers commissioned the finest artists throughout the world to adorn what is today, a living, walking, public miracle of a museum of the finest examples of Art Deco Art and Architecture to be found anywhere.
Paul Manship, famous in his own lifetime, would design the Titan and titanic "Prometheus," a gilded bronze masterpiece that would overlook this public plaza. Prometheus seems to float god-like above his ring of zodiac signs and rather closely to the rock that would be sadly be his tethered punishment for giving fire to mortals. The rock echoes with resonance in Rockefeller Center in front of "30 Rock" beneath the Top of the Rock.
Mr. Manship was never that fond of his sculpture, and odd that, as it went on to become the fourth most recognizable sculpture in America after The Statue of Liberty, The Lincoln Memorial, and Mount Rushmore. Prometheus is streamlined and stylized in the hallmark characteristics of Art Deco, and holds aloft in his hand the very flame that would set humankind free to create all that we are capable. Behind him are inscribed the words of the Greek poet and dramatist Aeschylus: Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.
But it would not be until 1936 that all other plans for the plaza in front of Prometheus were scrapped in favor of a bit of inspired loopiness. How about an ice skating rink? It immediately became titanically popular and has gone on to become one of the most beloved attractions in NYC and millions have flocked to the ice to fly through the air like Prometheus who looks down on them, inspiring them to soar in the shadow of his fire on the ice.
The Manahatta Project (currently under expansion as the Welekia Project) was launched in 2009 in conjunction with the 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson's historic sail up the river that now bears his name in the rather diminutive but hearty sailing vessel known as the Half Moon.
The Project sought to "re-discover" the Island of Manhattan as Hudson might have encountered it that very first time, a lush verdant hilly landscape, dappled with brooks and ponds, inlets and beaches, cliffs and valleys, and the infamous swamp lands in the middle of the island we now know as Central Park. Anthropological studies were painstakingly researched to determine the vegetation and wildlife of four centuries ago, and after years of data collection, scientific speculation and historical cross-referencing, a map emerged: A map of Manahatta, the Island of Many Hills, the land of the Leni Lenape and Algonquin tribes, part of the Iroquois Nation.
Open the map (it requires Flash Player) and see Manhattan of 2009, the grid of streets and avenues where space seems impossible to find, where buildings abut one another in friendly chaos, where parks are beautiful but designed by the hands of men and carved out of nature, where the bottom half of the island is distinctly "fatter" than it had been after years of nonchalant landfill, broken piers, trash, grounded ships, and, more recently, well thought-out projects like Battery Park City, 90-acres of land added to the southwest corner of Manhattan after the original excavation of the first World Trade Center in 1968.
And underneath this present vision, see the Manahatta of 1609: A very different place, a place where millions upon millions of personal triumphs and tragedies would eventually play out among the diminishing trees and rearranged streams. But this project is not meant to make us weep for the past, but to rearrange our vision of Manhattan in the dawn of a new century.
We are thoroughly committed to our green spaces, and are, for example, in the very midst of a one-million-tree-planting project. We hope to add green spaces to the roofs of almost every building in Manhattan, and as we add bike lanes and widen esplanades, with fewer people in automobiles, we fully expect our city to look much more green again. A canopy of green under which will lie the city that we all love. The best of both maps.
I found this site fascinating and I hope you will as well, with all my best wishes.
Looming over the kid-tastic Hecksher Playground at the southern end of Central Park is a rat-tacular hunk of Manhattan schist, a huge hunk of schist in fact, called Rat Rock. Kids enjoying the playground climb its heights and marvel at the mica shining in the sunlight in between slides and swings and seesaws and the very famous and fierce kick ball games for which the playground is best known. Hecksher Playground is the oldest (1927) and largest (three acres) playground in Central Park and just underwent a multi-million dollar renovation to make the fun even funner and the safety even safer. But if you want to put safety on a shelf for a moment, put on a good pair of sneakers and sneak up the side of the schist and you'll see the gouges of a glacier that scraped gravel along the granite during the last Ice Age, ice that once was a mile thick on top of your sunny head.
Winston Churchill is an American! An honorary one, but the first of three people ever to be made honorary citizens of the United States. He actually was half-American. In a page from Downton Abbey, his father was the Lord Churchill of the Dukes of Marlborough. But his mother was the Brooklyn-ite Jenny Jerome. Jerome Avenue is named for her father. So, we honor Winston Spencer Churchill here in NYC, in Greenwich Village, in a tiny quiet little grove on Bleecker Street (it sits on Downing Street proper, but most people access it from Bleecker) that is a scant .05 acres of shady paradise.
Churchill had a contentious but hysterical relationship with NYC society. His wit was often aimed at them, if not elsewhere. Here are some of my favorite barbs and delicious bites:
Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk.” Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.” Nancy Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.” Churchill: “If I were your husband I would take it.” A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Once in a while you will stumble upon the truth but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened. If you are going to go through hell, keep going. It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else. History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. A sheep in sheep’s clothing. (On Clement Atlee) A modest man, who has much to be modest about. (On Clement Atlee) I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter. A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others. The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong. If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
My thoughts today return to Washington Square Park, home of the triumphal arch commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Washington's Inauguration and designed by Stanford White. To think of the things that happened in this square is to think of the history of this city, and this nation, and in a real sense, of the world in the last two hundred years. Today it sits at the heart of the largest private university in the US, New York University. But think back to the wealthy and elegant families of the 19th Century that lived in that line of town-homes on the northern shore, think of Henry James chronicling their bondage to society in his crushing novel, Washington Square. Think of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911 that brought the city to it's knees in a grief we wouldn't experience again until September 11th, 2001. Look for the "hanging tree" and imagine the last thought of those who swung from it's menacing branch. Then think of happier times, of the glorious music that filled the fountain in the fifties and sixties, the folk explosion that informed a generation of not only musicians but poets and painters and politicos. Look around you at the new lamps and the new flower beds, the new pathways and dog runs, the breath of new life in a park that needed some weeding. On a very personal note, I miss my theatre there, the magnificent Manhattan Theatre Source that brought me to Washington Square more often than I would have gone. Now I'll have to make that special effort to get there unmotivated, except by the centuries of memories that whisper through it's trees and the promise of new memories to come.
