Autumn in New York

It’s supposed to be autumn in New York, but signs of it, if evident, are few. Days drift from sultry to balmy to lamely breezy at best, rendering evenings occasionally cool only by comparison. As seasons go, it’s no season at all. It’s too early for nature’s best show: that shocking change of indescribable colors that slips into town for a limited engagement, but too-hastily doffs its fiery bonnet and unceremoniously skips out with let’s-blow-this-town indifference.

Soon, it will be too cold for the lone street-corner sax player—whose thin, labored musical strains I hear every day well before I emerge through the arch of my building— to occupy the wee circle of prime sidewalk real estate he lays squatter’s rights to, to play, tirelessly, (tiresomely for me), the only song he apparently knows, “As Time Goes By.”

A block south of me, a man lives on the street with his dog, his cell phone, and his journals, which he has been observed to pour through, under one of those open-air phone booths mounted on a post. The wife of one well-known New Yorker routinely stops with her dog, crouches down and lingers to chat at length with him. He doesn’t lack guests to his blanketed oasis—yesterday, he was host to a young woman who stroked his disinterested dog as the two parties softly discussed... what? Assured that New Yorkers are not as indifferent as they are perceived to be, not by a long shot, I’m hoping to catch sight of whom among them will offer the man and his dog, inseparable, shelter for the winter. It has to be the best reality show going.

Nothing against man and dog, but truer to character, my heart goes out to the lonely man with a horn. In my mind, I offer him solace. But only on condition of his learning to play a new song. And, if it’s “Autumn in New York,” I readily foot the bills for every lesson for as long as it takes.

Fall is a foolish name to call a season so glorious, and, as the song says, “so inviting.” It’s autumn—in New York or anywhere else. Wikipedia says the word comes from the Old French autompne, automne in modern French, but doesn’t state what it meant or came to mean in old or new French. That may explain why autumn gained disproportionate popularity as fall. Wikipedia also tells us, “Since 1997, Autumn has been one of the top 100 names for girls in the United States.” But I’ve never met a girl named Autumn. Or Fall. So much for Wikipedia this season.

Autumns in New York may no longer spell “the thrill of first-nighting.” Not when substantially discounted preview tickets are available. But reliably, on every Halloween every autumn, every brownstone on West 69th Street in the two-block stretch between Central Park West and Broadway becomes a story-book haunted house full of thrills and treats for children of all ages. And for the 84th Thanksgiving morning, Central Park West and 7th Avenue (in lieu of Broadway) will become the Main Streets of Anytown for the locals, who gather hours earlier to view and to cheer on the footsloggers and float-squatters of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Autumn is the season for The New York Film Festival and The New York City Ballet; for this season, the overdue arrival of the longed-for Upper West Side Trader Joe’s and, painfully, the imminent departure of the community-prized Lincoln Square Barnes and Noble; the Yankees’ post-season and Christopher Columbus’ Day; plus so much more that is distinctly New York. The season and occasion for a love song to New York that sings to all. All the more poignant, then, to know that “Autumn in New York” was the inspiration of a Russian-born composer, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky, who became, in New York, the great American songwriter, Vernon Duke.

Autumn in New York,
It's good to live it again.

Listen to what Ella and Satch do with it.

A Muggy Day

While other New Yorkers were spending their sunny Memorial Day Saturday on beaches, admiring others’ tans and working patiently on theirs, I spent mine in Manhattan’s 20th Precinct with my daughter Lauren, looking at mug shots.

Nineteen hours earlier… how do I express this gently?... my DAUGHTER was MUGGED! In broad Daylight-Saving-Time daylight! For an iPod and an iPhone! Hence, iBrood and iBristle.

You tell yourself it could happen anywhere. But it didn’t happen anywhere, it happened in our “backyard.” In our beloved city. Within the confines of our Upper West Side 70s oasis. Out of the blue!, an unsettling interloper on our Isle of Contentment. A menacing anomaly to old-city blocks teeming with good and multi-cultural plenty.

Lauren had just emerged from a subway station on Central Park West, a half block from her apartment, had just put her phone in the same hand as her iPod when a man walking toward her seized both. As she instinctively clung to them, he spun her around and to the ground, and ran off, iLoot in hand. She rose, looked at a finger that was pointing in a direction perpendicular to where it belonged and, presumably in shock, pulled it into place and, shocking as it sounds if you know her, started running after the hood, screaming “Stop him!” Three young men in front of her gamely gave chase, but lost sight of him. The moment Lauren stopped, she felt the pain, excruciating, not only in her finger, but in her shoulder. An NYPD squad car came to her aid in moments, and its officers called an ambulance.

It all happened not only in sprinting distance from Lauren’s apartment, but also came within a block of her sister Haley’s and family, and two blocks from ours—The Fox Compound, as I’ve described the wheel of our family’s proximity. Our hospital of choice is all of a mile away.

Being transported by ambulance on the streets of Manhattan is by no means a pain-free experience; automobile shocks weren’t built to absorb NYC potholes. (These are the kinds of things you start to take perverse pride in after you’ve been here for awhile.) Lauren winced and groaned and more than once pronounced her shoulder broken—but, to be honest, when you’ve raised a drama queen, you tend to process everything to scale.

Yes, Lauren is an actress, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows her world that the boyishly-wise doctor administering to her at the hospital and the dashing NYPD detective who entered the room to begin investigating the case were straight out of central casting. Even their names, Walker and Brennan, seemed chosen by the studios.

X-rays revealed two fractures, her clavicle and her ring finger. The initial good news was that both fractures could heal by themselves. Further scrutiny revealed otherwise; Lauren would need two operations. At that point, the good news was that the operations could be done at the same time. The bad news was that the next day ushered in the holiday weekend, so she couldn’t be operated on until the next week. Worse news followed—her writing hand—her Facebook and texting hand!—would have to be in a cast.

You tell yourself bones heal. She didn’t hit her head, didn’t mar that beautiful face, and, watching her take everything in stride, it didn’t alter her beautiful outlook on life. Lips not moving, you tell yourself you should be livid, outraged! You know your lines, father, play your role! But all you feel and all you are is relieved.

In the late 50s and early 60s, a popular TV show set and shot on the streets of New York always ended with a narrator saying, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” This has been one of them, that’s all. It could happen anywhere.

A Wonderful Town, Installment Two

A man boarded an elevator in a Los Angeles building and chose the button for his floor. Even before the elevator had climbed to the second floor, he pushed the button three more times. A lady on the elevator said, “You must be from New York.”

New York, New York is “A Wonderful Town.” It’s a small town where Adolph Green, co-lyricist with Betty Comden of the song, “Wonderful Town” (not from the show “Wonderful Town” but from “On the Town”—got it?) became a wonderful New York chum. Adolph Green was a Jewish leprechaun to me, “spritely” and mentally mischievous. He was the best “drop-the-needle” player I ever encountered, meaning he could identify a piece of classical music faster (I suspected) than even the composer of “Wonderful Town” and “On the Town,” his collaborator on both shows, Leonard Bernstein. Adolph once sang a movement of Mahler for me (unsolicited) on the corner of 63rd and Central Park West. That’s not likely to happen at Hollywood and Vine.

A tourist from L.A. stops a New Yorker to ask, “Pardon me, could you tell me how to get to Times Square or should I just go fuck myself?”

My friend Herb Graff and I shared passions for New York quirks [see “A Wonderful Town” entry below], New York anecdotes and incomparable New York characters like Adolph Green. Profiled in The New Yorker for being one of the city’s great raconteurs, Herb could break up any room with his punchy, borscht-belt delivery, but when we dined with Adolph, it was Adolph who provided the often-suppressed laughter, often inadvertently. When Adolph typically couldn’t make up his mind—in this instance about what entrée to order—he looked at the next table to see what they were having. But he didn’t stop there. First he praised the way a certain dish looked, then asked what it was and was it good, and then, only faintly commended by the uncomfortable diner, he ordered it.

Herb dined out for years on this one: A man approached Adolph saying, “I’ll bet you don’t remember me.” Adolph screwed up his face and whined, “Don’t make me guess.” According to Herb, Robert Redford, on the town, when asked exactly the same question by a fellow who prefaced it with challenging remarks like “You’re a big man now” and “After all, you’re a star,” and the capper, “We went to school together,” replied, with initial feigned warmth, “I DO remember you! You were an asshole then and you’re an asshole now.”

It is a wonderful town. Herb had two California acquaintances who came to New York, excited because someone had given them, gratis, an unoccupied East Village pad to use. An un-air-conditioned pad. In the dead of August. On their first night here they tossed and turned until dawn in a one-hundred degree chamber until one of them suggested they put on the clothes they’d strewn, piece by piece, from beds to floor and go for a walk to get some air. Ninety degrees outside felt good to them when suddenly, at the crack of dawn, a man came charging down the street toward them… and past them… in a low-cut evening dress and stiletto shoes. These two Californians had never seen such a thing! They couldn’t wait to see Herb to tell him and couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Herb’s reaction? “He was probably late for work.”