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A
Christmas Story
Every day that I
can do it, the family Volkswagen Bus rolls out of the garage and
two of our four kids jump in for a ride from our Queens, New York
home to Amsterdam Avenue on the west side of Manhattan where they
attend school.
The children are a boy and girl.
Both are students at the LaGuardia High School for the Performing
Arts, Music and Art. In fact our other two children also graduated
from the same school.
Twice they made a movie about the
school, called “Fame.” The title song in that film
has a line in it that says: “I’m Gonna Live Forever.”
At times I think the line should
be changed to “I’m Gonna Live At Home Forever."
In any event my wife and I are dancing
as fast as we can.
But it’s for the youngsters
that sometimes two, even three times a week, we ride around inside
a vehicle once described as a “big comfortable living room
on wheels,” with a tiny engine about the size of four Kentucky
Fried Chicken boxes.
The ride is the thing.
Most people dread traffic.
This year, I have discovered that
often the morning news is much worse than traffic.
Call it “new normal”
post 9/11 for a lifetime New Yorker.
Since family is the real refuge
in life, I try to spend as much time as possible in the embrace
of sibling rivalries, better marks in math, and watching my son,
the actor in a movie called “The Ringer” that I totally
do not understand.
I have also tried to get in step
with my oldest daughter, who is an immaculate writer and in fact,
one of the best young writers in America, and her current love
interest, a boyfriend who is making movies in college. Our ride
to school begins on 188th Street in Hollis usually about 07:15
a.m.
The highway is always crowded.
Cars are entering New York City
on the road called the Grand Central Parkway (GCP) from Long Island.
Long Island sticks out from the
mainland for about 100 miles, but most of the people coming into
New York City are from Nassau County, not from Suffolk County
that continues where Nassau stops, to the end of Long Island.
Drivers even at this early part
of the day are serious, riding bumper to bumper because the road
narrows in Queens and the speed limit dips to where just a short
way down the road the Kew Gardens Interchange forms one very bad
bottleneck.
The kids, by the way long before
we get as far down the road as Kew Gardens, are snuggled up under
airline blankets and snoring while some Mozart echoes softly around
inside the bus.
Moving along past the Kew, we come
upon the Long Island Expressway (LIE) once aptly described as
“the world’s longest parking lot,” for its monumental
traffic jams.
As we roll, the landscape below
and above melts past our windows.
The VW Bus has lots of windows,
the untinted kind that let all the light and life going on around
you in.
Yes, it’s true, you can only
look out one window at a time, but in 1966, VW built a 21-window
bus offering vistas ahead, behind, alongside, plus a half a dozen
narrow slots that look all the way up to heaven.
Nissan copied that idea for a 2004
SUV.
Just beyond the LIE, we slip through
a corridor formed by the GCP, which features on both sides what
is left of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fair, including the
“theme” of the 1964 expo, a stainless steel globe
of the world called “The Unisphere.”
Most folks know the Unisphere as
the Continental Airlines logo. CO created an abstract image of
the sculpture that was done for the Fair by U.S. Steel.
Today, every time I see a CO aircraft
with its “globe” tail I think of the Unisphere.
The CO logo sits since 1964 behind
the NYC Building while a rather large Lufthansa billboard just
down the road proclaims:
“A Dozen Times A Day To Germany—And
That’s No LIE,” entreating a million mad road warriors
a day to get off that road and fly away to Deutschland.
Everybody loves New York, we think.
We pass Shea Stadium home of the
NY Mets baseball team and chug onward toward Bowery Bay where
LaGuardia Airport is located.
LaGuardia sort of extends itself
out to the GCP. In fact when an aircraft is arriving on final
over the road you notice that the lampposts are shorter in case
(god forbid) the aircraft comes in too low.
Sometimes when a B757 passes over
your car, low and fast you think you could almost touch the aircraft
swooping over the road and fence and landing.
Remember that all of LGA fits quite
neatly inside the oval roadway system of the passenger facilities
at JFK six miles down the road on Queens, New York’s south
shore.
The wonder is, how does this 600-acre
airport stay open, let alone handle 20 million passengers annually?
People just like LaGuardia Airport.
First, they liked Tim Peirce, who
as manger of the airport for 22 years was an absolute genius working
with the local politician Helen Marshall (who now is President
of the Borough of Queens) at getting a hostile neighborhood to
realize that airport fear was nothing more than another big city
trauma.
Those two (Tim died January 2000)
could have collided, but ended up creating a much-copied template
for the public and private sector to quit screaming at each other.
It’s funny, but the old van
sometimes drifts toward the exit that says LaGuardia with its
Kiwanis Kids’ Day, and pillows and blankets for people left
on the floor of cancelled, snowed-in flights.
Today there is a terrific young
man who is as big as a bear out prowling around all the time from
end to end of that airport, named Warren Kroeppel.
Warren, who reminds us of the character
"Bull" on the old TV show "Night Court",
is the manager of LaGuardia Airport.
The face, dear Warren puts on a
place that elsewhere might be sterile and impersonal, is of efficiency
and concern, a human touch that Ed Ingraham and dear Tim (the
two managed LGA for more than 50 years combined), perpetuated
like a badge of honor.
Next landmark is the Triborough
Bridge. Most New Yorkers know that the Triborough is usually the
fastest and best way to get into “the city” (most
everybody outside of Manhattan, even residents of the other four
boroughs that are part of greater New York City refer to Manhattan
as “the city”).
Built for the 1939 World’s
Fair and the opening of LGA Airport, the Tri-Borough Bridge touches
Queens, Manhattan and The Bronx, thus the name.
But once across the span we jog
off onto 125th Street in the heart of Harlem and quickly down
to 116th Street.
We stay away from the FDR Drive
named for President Roosevelt because it is always flooded when
it rains and always slow and busy even on clear days.
The FDR is a predictable traffic
mess of BMW’s and exotic cars with Connecticut, New Jersey
and New York license plates, full of people who don’t know
or wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere in Harlem.
As we move west on 116th Street
the early morning deliveries are just beginning.
You get a real sense of just how
cosmopolitan New York City is. Breakfasts can be Chinese dim sum
or Chilean Empanadas of egg and cheese or bagels and coffee or
even the old standby, McDonald’s.
Along our ride on 116th Street,
there simply is no excuse for anybody to complain that there is
no choice.
Of course as the music plays and
the kids sleep we never stop but rather enjoy the scene, planning
to return some day when the pace is less frenetic.
After a quick left turn onto Fifth
Avenue at 116th and then a quick right onto Central Park North
at 111 Street, the best part of the trip unfolds like a magic
carpet under our wheels and all around us.
Now we are in Central Park.
There is no greater place on earth
than Central Park. It’s a miracle that keeps amazing, every
time you are there.
The park is hilly up north and the
roadway that is only a couple blocks or so from Central Park West
twists and rolls through dense tree-lined areas that completely
obliterate any view of the mighty city surrounding.
There are joggers and people out
for horseback rides, and stands of pine trees and black birch
abound.
An early December snowfall made
the park feel like Vermont. People were out on cross-country skis
while off in the distance horns were honking beneath a steel gray
sky.
When you are in Central Park you
feel the pressure release instantly. What a wonderful interlude
our ride through this magic place always is.
We exit at 67th Street West, past
Tavern on The Green where all the trees have those little
white lights twinkling all the time.
But just across CPW on 67th is the
greatest restaurant in New York and the only place that you should
ever make certain that you visit no matter what, at least once
in this lifetime.
The place is called “Café
Des Artistes.”
What makes this place so great? Is it
the playful nudes made up as wallpaper adorning the walls of the
restaurant? Is it the food or all the rich and famous people who
frequent the establishment? Is it the price or the tough reservation
at the café?
All of the above, we think.
But don’t miss it.
We have not been able to afford
to eat there in a couple of years but the memory of our last visit
makes just being on the same street a pleasant ride.
A quick left off 67th and down Columbus
Ave past Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and around to
Amsterdam, which is behind Lincoln, Center and we are at LaGuardia
High School.
The kids mumble their thanks just
as long as we stop where the other kids arriving by subway cannot
see that “Daddy” drove them to school and we have
moved through one of the busiest rush hours of any city in the
world in just under 40 minutes arriving usually at about 07:50.
After goodbyes, it’s uptown
on Manhattan’s west side to 81st Street and Broadway for
a takeaway coffee and croissant at Zabars.
Zabars is the greatest deli/appetizing
gourmet store in New York.
The retail part of the place is
legendary with prepared foods, cheeses and breads that are beyond
compare anywhere else.
In fact, the entire idea of top
line specialty foods, prepared foods and the rest was a fixture
at Zabars before anywhere else.
A left turn from 86th Street (at
96th Street a cop will give you a $70.00 ticket) and the bus moves
down to the Hudson River and the West Side Drive.
Some days it’s a drive a bit
inland north past the tomb of General Grant while other days its
right down to the drive which moves along the river offering a
clear view across to New Jersey and ahead to the George Washington
Bridge (GWB), the most beautiful steel arc across any New York
waterway.
We always look closely approaching
the GWB straining to see the little red light house that once
served mariners on the busy Hudson River before the bridge was
built, and still stands, although a bit overpowered in 2006.
There is a wonderful children’s
story titled “The Little Red Lighthouse Under The Great
Gray Bridge,” that every child should read.
We are moving toward the Cross-Bronx
Expressway (CBE) now, leaving Manhattan’s West Side with
one quick last glance at the Palisades of New Jersey which just
beyond the GWB looks much as they did over 400 years ago when
Henry Hudson sailed for the first time, down the river that today
bears his name.
Across the northern part of New
York City on the CBE, the trusty VW Bus moves until we reach the
southern most part of the Hutcheson River Parkway where we head
south, crossing the Bronx Whitestone Bridge which connects via
the Whitestone Expressway to Astoria Blvd. which leads into our
parking spot near Air Cargo News offices at the Marine Air Terminal
at LaGuardia Airport.
Our early mornings are free of other
worldly matters, free of much attention to anything more than
family, the familiar and the comforting.
Cost is 8 bucks for tolls, about
five for gas and unspecified amounts for Zabars.
Our journey lasts for only about
an hour. But what an hour of power that is always there for us
and cannot ever be taken away. (Geoffrey 12/24/2002)
2009 Postscript:
Since this story originally appeared
eight years ago, the kids have gotten bigger and have gone on
to greater heights, but my bus and I are still rolling along,
older to be sure, but somewhat well ordered over in the right
hand lane.
Our younger daughter Emily (right)
graduated this past May from Brooklyn College, she refers to it
as “The Harvard of Brooklyn.”
So now our occasional “us
on the bus” routine no longer plays out along a thoroughfare
called The Interboro Parkway that begins where the Grand Central
Parkway ends, a few miles away from our Queens, New York home.
The Interboro that runs to Pennsylvania
Avenue in Brooklyn is one of the oldest limited access highways
in USA, and was created about the same time as the original Autobahn
in Germany during the early 1930’s.
Unlike its German cousin, Interboro
is a narrow serpentine roadway that in 2009 is among the most
outdated and dangerous highways in the universe.
A couple of years ago they named
the road for baseball great Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodger
who broke the color lines in baseball and was also a hell of a
third baseman.
Naming Interboro for Jackie, I think,
is an insult.
Jackie was smooth and always ahead
of his time.
Maybe they should name that new
sports center in Brooklyn after him.
In any event, my impression of Brooklyn
College is that you learn something and probably manage to remember
the place fondly when you get older.
Centerpiece of Brooklyn College
are the glorious main campus buildings.
 But
best of all is The Library.
The Brooklyn College Library is
a mammoth structure with a twelve-story clock tower topped with
a golden brass dome and spire.
The effect is heightened by a circular
set of windows leading up to the spire. The windows light up at
night and the place looks simply stunning.
The Brooklyn College Library is
just outstanding.
My first 2011 New Year Resolution
is to go to this magic place with my wife. When it is warm enough
for the crocuses we will make some cucumber sandwiches and sit
under a tree and just relax and enjoy that campus, if we can get
past the guards.
As Emily prepares to go up the ladder
to a Masters Degree and beyond, the other kids include Ralph who
as an energetic, talented young film director has just completed
shooting his first feature length movie entitled "Worst Friends"
that is nearing completion otherwise carrying the young man's
high hopes for 2011.
 Our
older daughter Florence (left with me) is now editing
Air Cargo News FlyingTypers whilst otherwise writing
every moment
Geoffrey II & Christina married
in October 2009 celebrated their first anniversary. Geoffrey just
finished fiming a 13 week series for ABC TV titled "Body of Proof"
that will debut next March every Tuesday evening right after "Dancing
With The Stars" the network's top show in America.
Early this year Geoffrey was a feature
player in the movie hit “Devil” produced
by M. Night Shyamalan.
The group shot (below) taken last
year (still a favorite) includes groomsmen including Geoffrey,
Ralph & Geoffrey II pictured enroute to the wedding. Others
include (far left) Vincent Kartheiser & Mike Damus and far
right, Daniel Gritzer.
Café des Artistes closed
in August 2009 and although we did get to visit the restaurant
only a couple of times, we still miss the European patina of the
place—it would have been at home in Paris, London or Rome.
But now it is time to close down
another chapter in our journey together.
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Thanks for the ride
and all your good wishes and comments about our work.
As Christmas 2010 is upon us, our
hopes and priorities for 2011 are getting clearer:
Merry Christmas, peace and goodwill
to everyone.
Geoffrey 12/24/2010
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