| Some jewels in our crown by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 11-28-2002 This is the finest of American holidays. When the wonderful balloons are finished in Herald Square, most of us retreat to the company of family and friends. There is virtually no political bombast attached to the day, and no martial music. We spend the hours in tight, small circles, and if we're lucky, we get to see King Kong climbing the Empire State Building, driven there by love. On this day, we pause, we feast, we toast, we express gratitude for the things of life. Here are some of the people and places I cherish, beyond the intimate circle of family and friends: The view of Manhattan at dusk from the cliffs of New Jersey, the facades of our skyscrapers burnished by the fading sun. Firefighters standing in the doors of firehouses, always laughing, always ready to go where none of the rest of us would ever go. Albert Murray, one of our finest writers, loyal to craft, to the power of words, to his beloved Harlem. The Battery on a Sunday afternoon when the wind is blowing from the west, and there are whitecaps on the great harbor, and you can feel the ghosts of old Dutch settlers and British colonials and thousands who lived and died in slavery. Leonard Lopate, who brings such care and intelligence to his WNYC radio show, five days a week. Never cheap. Never stupid. A splendid New Yorker. Orchard St. and Essex St. on a Sunday morning, where you can see the new immigrants merging with the old and get bialys that are fresh and warm, and find the last true pickles in America. The Metropolitan Museum. Inwood Hill Park, which holds hidden caves in its 196 acres, stands of trees whose origins go back before the American Revolution and even a salt marsh, the last in Manhattan. This is the best place in the city for putting yourself into the world before the Europeans arrived, and before the forests were destroyed, the hills leveled, the earth tunneled, a time when wolves still howled in the night and whales grazed in the harbor. Joe Torre. Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, which is beautiful and still, and holds the remains of Boss Tweed and Joey Gallo, along with William S. Hart and Lola Montez. There are also many graves of New York firemen who died doing their jobs, from an era when they were buried in "the Greenwood" without cost. Chinatown. There are three of them now, of course, one each in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. But I cherish the oldest one. The most beautiful police station in the city is on Elizabeth St., just off Canal, carrying the date 1881. That was the year that Henry James published his great novel "The Portrait of a Lady." It was also the year, in distant Arizona, when Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp walked into the O.K. Corral, and in the next state a transplanted New Yorker who called himself Billy the Kid was shot dead. I always look at that police station, on my way to shop or dine, and think: What a marvelous country. The Woolworth Building. The hills of Prospect Park in winter, with snow falling on those meadows where Washington's amateur soldiers died in the Revolution, and where hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn kids played cowboys, Indians and jungle boys in the forests, and where the snow falls every year on the grave of Montgomery Clift in the Quaker Cemetery. Imus. The Brooklyn Museum. Manhattan's Foley Square at midnight, when you can still hear (if you listen carefully) the murmuring ghosts of all those who once lived in the Five Points. That was the name of the worst 19th century slum in the country, its bones interred under the courthouses and government buildings. In its jam-med, fetid streets, with their tottering frame houses, the Irish, the Africans and the Jews collided with one another, fought one another and eventually forged their alliances based on politics, labor and, yes, love. Yankee Stadium. Even old Dodger fans know in their hearts that it's a New York treasure. Yes, the Yankees played there, but so did Robinson and Reese, Furillo and Snider and Erskine and the others. Tearing it down because it's old would be like tearing down the Statue of Liberty. Jonathan Schwartz. The Frick Collection, at 70th and Fifth. The true jewel of New York museums, with its lovely garden, its three Vermeers (among many great paintings), its period furniture and its mixed aura of grandeur and intimacy. The Strand Bookstore, at Broadway and 12th, and its branch on John St. The City University. Hanover Square. No place is more elegant on a Saturday afternoon in summer, and I'm always comforted on its benches knowing that up to the right Captain Kidd once lived a respectable life before being hanged in London for piracy. The NYPD, the most professional police department in the country. Bryant Park and its elegant neighbor, Grand Central Terminal. Both are symbols of the possibilities of rebirth, when enough people of will and vision decide to act. Madison Square. I can't go there without thinking of Stanford White, greatest of all New York architects, who built the second Madison Square Garden on the northern edge of the square and was murdered in its roof garden in 1906. Nathan's in Coney Island. Union Square, teeming with life on the days of the farmers' market, surrounded by splendid restaurants, Barnes & Noble, the Paragon sporting goods store, and now enshrined in modern New York memory for its role as our central plaza after Sept. 11. Elaine Kaufman and her wonderful saloon.
Originally published on November 28, 2002 |
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