MANHATTAN
Local History
May 8, 2015
Traces of Ziegfeld’s New York
By Tony PerrottetA century ago, Broadway actors spoke of a “Ziegfeld Curse,” because so many of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s famous showgirls came to tragic ends. In the generations since the impresario’s death in 1932, New Yorkers might be forgiven for thinking that there is also a curse on anything to do with Ziegfeld’s memory. His lavish theater on Sixth Avenue was demolished in 1966, and now the owners of the Ziegfeld Theater, the world’s largest single screen cinema, built near the site of the original, have considered closing it, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
But the Ziegfeld Club, the subject of an article in this Sunday’s Metropolitan section, remains, as do other relics connected to the famous “Follies” impresario.
The great survivor of old Times Square is the New Amsterdam Theater. This 1903 Art Nouveau jewel box, once known as “the House Beautiful” and “the Diamond of 42nd Street” was where the “Ziegfeld Follies” were staged from 1913 to 1927, as well as the much racier “Midnight Frolic” in the nightclub-style Roof Garden. There, Ziegfeld built a glass-floored runway so gentlemen like Diamond Jim Brady and William Randolph Hearst could look up the Girls’ skirts as they strolled overhead. When the theater was renovated by the Walt Disney Company in the 1990s, the Roof Garden became offices; the glass runway was recreated but with “clouded” glass to change its original purpose.
Next door is the Liberty Theater, a majestic Art Deco relic abandoned in the 1930s and renovated in the 1990s, that is now serving as the setting for an immersive theater production called “Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic.” Audience members have to weave past tourists on the gaudiest stretch of 42nd Street to the Liberty Diner, which is sandwiched between an Applebee’s and a Dave and Buster’s. But once inside, attendants in vintage tuxedos and silk gowns usher guests toward a red curtain in the back wall, which opens onto the stunning Liberty Theater.
The play hinges on the fate of Olive Thomas, a winner of “The Most Beautiful Girl in New York” competition who joined the Follies and married a playboy actor, Jack Pickford. Mystery still lingers around her sensational death from drinking mercury in Paris: New Yorkers debated whether she was murdered by her husband, committed suicide or drank the solution by accident, as the French police finally decided. Actors insist that Olive’s ghost still haunts the New Amsterdam Theater, where she once performed. When the theater reopened after renovations in 1997, a security guard resigned after seeing a woman in lingerie wandering the stage clutching a green bottle, and cast members still touch a portrait of Olive as they leave the stage door every night.
Many actors lived at the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street near Central Park, and the celebrity photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston kept his studio there. Johnston took hundreds of portraits of the Ziegfeld Girls in various states of undress, creating the first supermodels and pinups. The cafe-restaurant, which catered to the building’s residents, most of whom had no kitchens, is now The Leopard at des Artistes. Although heavily renovated, nine original murals of naked nymphettes, “Fantasy Scenes with Naked Beauties” by Howard Chandler Christy, still overlook the rooms.
Perhaps the most poignant relic of all sits outside a grand brownstone at 52 East 80th Street — the carved stone head of a Greek goddess that once graced the facade of the original Ziegfeld Theater. Opened in 1927 with funding by the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, this Art Deco classic on Sixth Avenue was torn down despite widespread protests, to make way for an office tower — an act of urban vandalism considered by some to be on a par with the destruction of Pennsylvania Station.
According to Broadway lore, the producer Jerome Hammer jokingly asked a friend who was working on the new building for one of the goddesses. To his surprise, some months later a crane lowered the statue in front of his house. It remains there today, noticed only by few history-loving passers-by — sitting, symbolically enough, right next to the trash cans.
Mar 4, 2015
Making Room for More Slush
By The New York TimesWorkers shoveled the dirty residue of the previous night’s precipitation in Times Square early on Wednesday. The forecast called for more snow on Thursday in the New York region, and a return of colder temperatures after a brief warm-up.
Jan 13, 2015
Pocket of Support for M.T.A. Budget
By The New York TimesAt a news conference, lower left, in Grand Central Terminal on Tuesday, the Empire State Transportation Alliance, a coalition of civic groups, backed full government financing of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s proposed five-year capital plan.
Manhattan
Dec 24, 2014
Before the Pageant, Earning Their Wings
By The New York TimesFrom left, Cricket Sevener, 9, Lulu Bernard, 12, and Mary Wood, 10, putting on their angel costumes for the children’s Christmas pageant at Brick Presbyterian Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on Wednesday.
Dec 7, 2014
Caroling to Save a Cafe
By The New York TimesThe Jolly Holidays Caroling Company performed outside of Cafe Edison at a rally to protest the eviction of the cafe at 228 West 47th Street in Manhattan. Elected officials, members of the theater community and neighbors attended the rally.
Oct 2, 2014
Kissing in the Rain
By The New York TimesMetropolitan Diary
Aug 14, 2014
An Art Project on Wheels
By Virginia AntonelliDear Diary:
On a perfect warm and sunny summer’s day, I was walking down West End Avenue to my neighborhood subway station. As I was about to turn up West 73rd Street, I noticed a car parked on the corner that I initially dismissed as a heap of trash on wheels. Upon closer inspection, I realized that this eyesore was actually a delightful display of whimsy.
I could not discern the make or model, but it was not a recent vintage of vehicle. Every original detail, both inside and out, had been painted or heavily embellished with welded toys, shoes or pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Some creative soul, or souls, had put a tremendous amount of energy and effort into transforming an innocuous compact sedan into a unique mobile art installation. Spontaneously seeing this object of nonconformity parked on a residential side street, instead of on display in a modern art museum, enhanced the fun of my chance encounter.
If I did not have someplace to be, I could have easily spent much longer viewing this entertaining jalopy. Upon my return home, I walked down 73rd Street again hoping for another glimpse. By then it was gone. The exhibit had hit the road.
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Jul 31, 2014
Falling Glass From Midtown Office Tower Injures 3
By The New York TimesJul 13, 2014
Three Cheers for Germany
By The New York TimesBird Week
May 10, 2014
It’s Gadgets vs. Eyeballs as Two Species of Bird-Watchers Clash
By Corey Kilgannon and Emily S. RuebPete Dunne and Benjamin Van Doren are devout birders who share a passion for identifying rare species, recording their sightings and competing in birding events known as Big Days.
But as they prepared for the biggest Big Day of all, Saturday’s World Series of Birding in New Jersey, their technological approaches could hardly be more disparate.
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Mr. Van Doren, 20, a sophomore at Cornell, has a $2,500 camera setup, and an iPhone stocked with digital field guides, apps that play recordings of bird songs and help him, with GPS, home in on where he might find certain species.
Mr. Dunne, 62, has been preparing a bit differently. He refuses to bring a camera and keeps his cellphone turned off. He eschews birding apps and digital libraries in favor of the handwritten journal that he has kept since he was 7. The proliferation of digital photography and other technology changes the whole dynamic of birding, he said, “getting away from the art of field identification.”
It was all leading to a regrettable mind-set, he added, of “Shoot first and identify later.”
Not long after professional baseball came around to instant replay, the booming world of competitive birding, once seen as a refuge from the clatter of the modern world, is now debating how much it should embrace technology. It is as close as birding, long proud of its honor system, has ever come to an identity crisis, particularly over the issue of whether photography should be required to prove a spotting. In debates among birders, the encroachment of smartphones and digital cameras has become inseparable from another touchy issue, the matter of questionable sightings, known as stringing.
The World Series is held every May throughout New Jersey, a major migration stop for birds heading north, and the event routinely attracts roughly 1,000 of the world’s top birders, who will race around the state from midnight to midnight, often in four-member teams, trying to identify as many species as they can by sight or sound. Their reward will be bragging rights and the Urner-Stone Cup, which resembles a miniature version of hockey’s Stanley Cup, though there are no cash prizes.
The competition, which also raises money for conservation, does not require photo evidence, and scoring remains on the honor system, though contestants who claim to have seen or heard rare birds can expect to be questioned by other teams about details. The rules do not allow the use of digital gadgets in the spotting or hearing of birds. Recorded calls cannot be played in the open, where they could inadvertently — or intentionally — induce birds to respond, for example. But birders are permitted to refresh themselves — in their cars, only — with recorded bird calls.
The pro-tech camp argues that it is silly to prohibit tools that educate birders, make birding more welcoming for novices, and build popular support for saving bird habitats.
“It is bringing a new breath of air into the competitions,” said Scott Whittle, a commercial photographer from Cape May, N.J., who has a $10,000 photo setup. He is also helping develop an app called Bird Genie that recognizes and identifies bird calls in the field.
He said he began birding six years ago and photographed his sightings “because I knew I wasn’t a good enough birder for people to trust me.”
The verification of sightings and combating stringing — arguable sightings by inexperienced, overeager or simply cheating birders — is one of birding’s most pressing issues and is the main argument for the use of photos.
Birding’s popularity, fueled in part by the recent films, “The Big Year,” and “ A Birder’s Guide to Everything,” is approaching an extreme-sport level, with adrenaline-pumped teams putting in sleepless days.
The American Birding Association has begun discussions to revise portions of its code of ethics, said Jeffrey Gordon, the association’s president. The code serves as a guideline for birders, though competition organizers are free to make their own rules. Mr. Gordon said that what little there was in the code regarding technology — there is a mention, for example, of curbing the use of “tape recorders” — has likely gone unchanged since being established a decade ago, “before people were walking around with libraries of bird songs in their pocket.”
While the honor system remains paramount, Mr. Gordon said, photographs, provided they have not been altered, can offer “a higher standard of evidence,” especially for rare sightings, and for newer birders who have yet to establish reputations of being rock-solid in their identifications.
“I hear young birders joking around saying, ‘Photos or it didn’t happen,’” he said. “The expectation is that if you report something rare, you’re going to need a photograph. And I only see that increasing.”
The association created a new category of competition: Photo Big Days. Last month, Mr. Whittle and Tom Stephenson, a Brooklyn-based birder who leads tours in Prospect Park, organized a Photo Big Day in Texas, and competed as well, photographing 209 birds in 24 hours, which the birding association has recognized as a record for North America.
Even purists like Mr. Dunne, a New Jersey Audubon Society official who founded the World Series, said any tool that made birding more accessible was welcome. But introducing them to competitions goes against the trust implicit in birding, the purists said, and turns what should be a contest of devotion and skill into a free-for-all where tech wizardry and expensive cameras become the de facto entry requirements.
“We’re at a pivotal time,” Mr. Dunne said, acknowledging that birding technology was “going to change birding dramatically and probably permanently.”
Drew Weber, who writes a blog about birding and technology at NemesisBird.com and helps develop birding apps, said he has heard some resentment among old guard birders toward tech-savvy ones who have gained vast birding knowledge with comparably little time spent in the field.
“A lot of traditional birders, honing their skills for decades, had to put all this time in, and they might see technology as a shortcut,” he said.
Teams in the World Series recruit members who can identify bird calls and can scout where targeted species are likely to be seen. To prepare for the event, Mr. Van Doren’s Cornell team has spent a week driving around New Jersey using apps to log where specific birds had been spotted. They are not allowed to use apps to acquire new information during the event, but they can use them to refer to previously gathered information.
Mr. Van Doren acknowledged that technology should have its limits. The day will come, he predicted, when binoculars themselves will be able to identify birds. “That would be lame from a birding perspective,” he said, “because it would take the skill out of it.”