Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of letters from Brooklyn, that are actually fascinating emails sent out by former San Diego Union Tribune TV columnist Bob Laurence. He sends these out by email but they are so fascinating that they are virtual newspaper columns and — with his full permission — we will start running them here.
When I worked with him on the newspaper years ago (I was a reporter and friend and at times worked under hm when he would fill in on the city desk on weekends), I often told him that I considered him the best TV writer in the business and I never wavered from that view (and still don’t). He left the paper (he now writes TV reviews for San Diego.com) and and moved to Brooklyn, where he then started sending periodic emails about what life was like in that underrated place — and in NYC itself. Meanwhile, my niece Stephanie Gandelman came to visit me this week. She just graduated from architect’s school and lived in…Brooklyn. Her eyes were virtually shoning as she she told me about what a wonderful it was to visit, work and live in Brooklyn while we sat and ate Indian food at World Curry in San Diego’s famous Pacific Beach neighborhood.
So, with this double pro-Brooklin whammy, TMV now offers you the first of Bob’s emailed letters from Brooklyn — letters that may actually touch on life in NYC, a variety of subjects and places….and provide ongoing proof that he is the best in the business.
Brooklyn 35
Monet, Manet, Pagliacci
by Bob Laurence
It’s a gray, drizzly day in New York, a little chilly and damp for lounging in a beach chair in the middle of Broadway in Times Square.
What’s that you say? Who would ever lounge in a beach chair in Times Square, the noisiest, most chaotic, confusing, stimulating place on the planet? (It’s not, actually, as we found out recently.) A lot of people have been doing just that. Following an edict from the pedestrian-friendly Bloomberg administration, the city has closed five blocks of Broadway in Times Square and in Herald Square (two or three blocks around 34th Street) to cars, buses and trucks, turning them into pedestrian malls.
So last weekend, Memorial Day, when the summer experiment kicked off, New Yorkers dragged their beach chairs out of their closets and hauled them over to Times Square and did some serious lounging smack in the middle of Broadway, simply because they could. The Times ran a large picture of them relaxing on the front page Tuesday, everybody dreaming they’re on the beach at Coney Island.
The couple you see walking along an empty street are in fact walking through Herald Square, formerly nearly as crowded as Times Square.
Truck drivers, not surprisingly, are less than enthusiastic. Now, instead of driving up to a shop to make deliveries, they have to find a place to park a block or two around the corner and haul stuff over. And seeing there are now significantly fewer parking places to be found and just as many trucks, they have to double-park even more than before and they’re getting more tickets. And cab drivers, of course, have lost a major arena for picking up fares.
At a 14th Street athletic shop, I spotted this bicycle rider in the window. As the sign says, he was part of a team riding 3,000 virtual miles to raise money for breast cancer research.
This was our first weekend back in New York after two fantastic weeks spent in Paris and Rome, and I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But first, this news bulletin:
WE HAVE A NEW GRANDBABY!
Throughout our Europe trip, Susan was great with grandchild. Her son, Adam, and his wife, Elizabeth, were expecting daughter No. 3 at any moment. Two or three times a day, we’d rush over to the computer in the hotel lobby and check her e-mail: Is there a baby yet?
Day after day, no baby. We returned to New York last Friday, still no baby. At last, and in her own good time, Eloise Bloom White made her entrance at 7:30 a.m. Monday, Memorial Day. She weighed in at 10 pounds, 23 inches. The midwife said she was the biggest girl baby she’d ever seen. Eloise, we’re proud to say, led her team to victory in the hospital’s nursery basketball tournament.
Susan right now is in Melrose with Adam and the family, helping out with kids and baby, her favorite duty.
As for that vacation, it was our first in a couple of years. We flew overnight and cheap on Aer Lingus, changing in Dublin to get to Paris. Aer Lingus, we discovered, is a huge bait-and-switch operation. ALL flights go in and out of Dublin Airport, which is really a vast, sprawling duty-free shopping mall thinly diguised as an airport. Fly Aer Lingus to Paris, stop and shop Dublin. Fly home from Rome on Aer Lingus, stop and shop Dublin again. We outfoxed ’em. We bought only food and the Irish papers, filled with juicy scandals of all sorts. Oh, and a baby item on the way home. Well, we had euros to spend.
Paris was rainy and gray most of the time, but we had a fantastic time. Museums and food were grand as always. Our best meals were at the Villa Victoria on rue Lamartine, a tiny place a few blocks from our hotel. We shopped at Galleries Lafayette, which must be the most splendid department store anywhere, went to the Louvre (avoid the Louvre’s audioguide, impossibly complicated) and the D’Orsay and the Orangerie, the homes of Delacroix and Moreau (very weird), and just basically never stopped. Susan’s favorite thing was the ballet, John Cranko’s Oneguine, at the Palais Garnier, which must be the most ostentatiously gorgeous theater building on the planet, with gilt statuary flying off the roof and through the lobby, vast circular stairways, and the interior total gold and red plush. It’s just astounding.
One change we noticed in Paris: cars no longer park on the sidewalk, as they did routinely the last time we were there. I think what’s done it is the black metal poles, each about four feet high, roughly 10 feet apart, that now stand along the curbs almost everywhere, making sidewalk parking pretty impossible. Not that we were driving. We mostly rode the metro, a great system. The cars are smaller than those in New York, and the trains are only four cars each instead of 10. But they run much more frequently; we never waited longer than five or six minutes for the next train. And their stations are considerably cleaner than ours, I must admit. And not so many subway musicians. But on one ride we were entertained by a young singer with guitar and a battery-powered amp, running through a repertoire of your favorite soft-rock hits – “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” etc. – performing as if in concert. He was pretty good and we dropped a euro in his guitar case.
After six days in Paris, we boarded a train for Rome. The ride was delightful, beautiful, green scenery, small towns all the way with snow in a few of the higher stretches.
Then six days in Rome, the home of majestic ruins and an incredible number of ancient churches, some going back to the year 200 or so, every one stunning in its own way. One thing we noticed was that Italian cops have really spiffy looking uniforms. And we were both disappointed by the lack of trees in Rome. It was hot and sunny, and we would have appreciated the shade of a tree here and there. But except for a few of the wider, nicer streets, we saw hardly any trees at all. Vast, wide open, sunny plazas with not a tree in sight. Same with St. Peter’s Square. Huge open space, no trees.
And Rome, a city just totally unsuited to the automobile, has surrended itself to cars, trucks, motorcycles, scooters. Absolutely the worst, noisiest, most chaotic traffic I’ve ever seen or heard anywhere, made worse by the narrowness and windiness of the roads. A few suicidal souls even ride bicycles in the morass. In Rome, parking on the sidewalk is fine by everybody. Even though the sidewalk might be only four or five feet wide. If the sidewalk is full, not a problem. Park at the intersection, front wheels at the curb, tail end of the car sticking out into traffic.
The metro system is not nearly as complete as in Paris, though. There are basically two lines, one running northeast to southwest, the other northwest to southeast. If your destination isn’t along those lines, you’re out of luck. But lucky for us, our hotel was near the Termini, the big Rome train depot, where the two lines cross. So we were usually able to get somewhere close to our destination.
I won’t go through the list of all the museums-and-art we saw, but we did get to the Villa Torlonia, a very interesting place. It’s a park in the northeast corner of the city, once a family’s estate. And the big family mansion is where Mussolini lived from 1925 to 1943. It’s open to the public now, but hardly a mention of Il Duce anywhere, until you get to his bedroom, where the info plaque informs you that this is where he slept, and that’s his bed. The second floor is now an art museum where the most interesting art is a couple of art-deco-ish paintings on one wall. They were done by one of the American GIs who occupied the mansion in the postwar years and are really nice and, we were happy to see, still there.
While we were there, some PR people were setting up a room for a press conference. They were publicizing a new book revealing that Mussolini’s daughter had a long love affair after the war with a prominent communist. But not many members of the press seemed to be showing up. I got the impression that nobody cared anymore what Mussolini’s daughter did. (His son, Romano, by the way, was a respected and successful jazz pianist. He died in 2006 at the age of 79.)
And we got to the Rome Opera House, not nearly as sumptuous as the Paris opera house, but very nice. (A plaque over the center of the stage informs one and all that Mussolini restored the building from decades of decay. Italians seem to have an awkward relationship with the memory of Mussolini, reluctantly recognizing that he did some good things, trying to forget all that nasty unpleasant stuff such as fascism and World War II.)
There we saw a production of ‘Pagliacci,’ easily the most extravagant, gorgeous opera production we’ve ever seen. Absolutely breathtaking. Directed by the film director Franco Zeffirelli, it was spectacular, totally over-the-top passionate and emotional, with easily 100 in the chorus.
After the opera, there was nothing to be done but stop in at a sidewalk restaurant and get an ice cream sundae and walk back to our hotel.
Until next time,
Bob & Susan
Bob Laurence
Brooklyn
Television Critic
SanDiego.com
read my columns at: www.sandiego.com/television.jsp