Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of journalist Bob Laurence’s letters from Brooklyn which detail life there and in NYC. Bob left his longtime home in San Diego and moved to “the big city.”
I learned the original meaning of ‘stoop’ over the weekend. A stoop is the short staircase that leads up from the sidewalk to the front door of the brownstone homes in New York. As in “sitting on the stoop,” or “stoop sale,” New York’s sidewalk equivalent of the garage sale.
“Stoop” is the Dutch word for “step,” and it goes back to when the Dutch ruled New York.
I learned that and more from Arthur Marks, who is 75 years old and is a professional New York tour guide. Mr. Marks wears big goggle eyeglasses, a broad-brimmed straw fedora, and a madras plaid jacket over a red-and-white checkered shirt with khaki slacks.
He was our leader on a guided walk around Greenwich Village Saturday. But before we started, a distraction. Suddenly, without notice, a woman was lying flat on her back on the sidewalk. We had no idea what had happened or how she got there. But one of our number ran across the street where an ambulance was parked and alerted the medics. Someone else dialed 911 on a cell phone. Within a few minutes, two ambulances and a fire truck were on the scene. The woman had a plastic hospital i.d. tag on her wrist and one of the medics recognized her as an epileptic who’d been released from the hospital, apparently in good condition, earlier that morning. One passerby spotted a scarf she’d dropped on the sidewalk and rushed it over to the ambulance and handed it to one of the medics.
The ambulance took off, and so did we. Mr. Marks, who’s been leading New York tours for 50 years, is a man who loves to tell stories and sing songs. To illustrate various points of his streetcorner lecture, he sang “Second Hand Rose” and “A Bicycle Built for Two,” not just a chorus or two, but all the way through. He took us to, among other places, the Cooper Union Great Hall – a basement auditorium punctuated by pillars here and there through the room — where Lincoln gave the “united we stand, divided we fall” speech that won him the Republican nomination.
We visited McSorley’s Old Ale House, Established 1854, a dark and musty joint with, it appears, much of the original decor and dust still intact. Mr. Marks, who has a sly, offhanded sense of humor, informed us that in the 19th Century only men were allowed at McSorley’s. Then he added, sotto voce, that Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman “would have been in heaven.” (I’ve attached a picture of McSorley’s, along with one of Mr. Marks in full song, and another of the Continental, a Village bar that, as the sign indicates, promises nothing more than a cheap drunk.)
We visited Washington Mews, a quaint, tiny street, once a row of stables, now a row of offices and faculty housing belonging to New York University. There are a few Spanish touches in the decor, inspired, Mr. Marks said, by San Diego’s 1915 world’s fair. And we saw Greene Street, which, Mr. Marks said, was once “the most notorious street of whorehouses in New York.”
His walk started at 11:30 a.m. and would last, he said, about two hours. At about 3, he led us into a small but splendid Village restaurant and we all had a conversation-filled lunch.
Susan was still visiting grandkids over the weekend, so Tom Detzel (one of her pals from ProPublica) and I went to hear Barbara Cook at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. Barbara Cook, in case you don’t know, was the original Marian the Librarian in “The Music Man” back in 1957. She’s 81 now and still sings in a sweet, powerful, light soprano voice. She was backed by the New York Philharmonic, and her concert was just gorgeous. She’s a treasure. She sang for just an hour and 20 minutes but, as Tom said, “what the hell, she’s 81.”
Susan and I took the No.3 subway last night from her office near Wall Street to see the revival of “South Pacific” still playing at Lincoln Center. We were able to do it seeing the producers finally met our price. We nearly always buy our tickets at the half-price booth. There’s never any shortage of shows we want to see and are available. And if one we want to see is not offered at half-price, we just wait a while. That’s the luxury of being in New York as long-term tourists. Speaking of which, we’ve just begun our second year. And this spring, so far, is pleasantly cooler than last year.
After a winter of walking, I’ve started riding my bike again. Took a few turns around Prospect Park this week. It felt good to get out and go fast. Even going slow felt pretty good.
We loved “South Pacific,” a big, extravagant production filled with beautiful songs, great actors, bittersweet memories of World War II and strong, disturbing reminders of a time when race could be a wider division between people than it is today. For its time, it was pretty brave. As I told Susan, the stories of interracial couples reminded me of a couple I saw a few weeks ago walking in New York. The man was white, the woman Asian, both were in their late 70s or 80s, and I wondered what they might have endured when they were young and first in love.
It’s been raining all day today, but it should be nicer over the weekend. We hope to go shopping in Little Italy, and Susan wants to find ingredients to make a really special bread that we had for our breakfasts at our Rome hotel.
Cheers to all,
Bob & Susan
Bob Laurence
Brooklyn
Television Critic
SanDiego.com