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| Cher's neighborhood in Moonstruck...and mine for a year or so in the 1980s. |
It’s true.
I was born there, lived there for many years of my youth and again, even longer, as an adult.
I loathe the NY mayors one is supposed to loathe, chief among those Abraham Beame and David Dinkins. I love those one is supposed to love, chief among those Edward I. Koch, but also including Rudy Giuliani.
I know. Giuliani has recently been tarred with a lot of brushes, and possibly his feet are more certainly of clay than many others’ feet. Still, after he became mayor, the city became liveable once again. So, for that―no matter what else emerges that tarnishes his glow among New York’s mayoral glitterati―I will continue to love him.
But my true hero is Ed Koch. Koch served for 12 years, virtually all of the time I lived in NYC consecutively, having moved back to the city during the preceding Abe Beame administration (I shudder to think) and remaining until the minus-4 temperatures and tornadic winds blowing through Manhattan’s canyons one Christmas Eve convinced me to seek sub-tropical temperatures in Florida. But then, we’re all entitled to the occasional mistake.
Anyway, Ed Koch―bless his little soot-and-Nedicks heart―used to stand at the subway steps at 86th Street and Lexington Avenue when I first moved to the Yorkville neighborhood, saying good morning to people scurrying down that hole in the ground in the darkness of the Nixon ban on daylight savings time.
I was using the subway to get from Yorkville to my first real publishing job, as an editor for Prentice Hall business newsletters. Unaccountably, the offices were in Midtown, on Fifth Avenue at 54th Street, almost across from St. Thomas (Episcopal) Church, which shortly became my lunchtime refuge as I realized the managing editor I worked for was N-U-T-S. I lasted a mere six months in that asylum before quitting to freelance, an enterprise that could only be undertaken because my husband had a job reverse commuting to the Stamford, CT. daily newspaper. This meant that one or the other of us spent a minimum of one hour a day cruising the streets near our apartment to find parking for the car. We couldn’t afford a garage, and needless to say, on-street, legal parking spaces in NYC are always at a premium.
I wish I had had some more seasoning as a writer back then. If I had, I might have written a novel like Tepper Isn’t Going Out, a fictional account of parking in Manhattan by Calvin Trillin.
Or maybe I’d have written it later, when I was living in Carroll Gardens, the area of Brooklyn made semi-famous in the Cher vehicle, Moonstruck. The year I lived there, in a converted munitions factory at 505 Court Street that had the grandest 3-BR apartments with views of NY harbor you can imagine, it snowed almost as much as the blizzard of 2010. It took weeks and weeks for all the snow to melt and all the cars to be freed from their ice sculptures.
One car, very close to the corner on one of the blocks where we took the dogs to poop, had a 3-inch stack of parking tickets on it, as it hadn’t moved since right before the snow, and alternate-side parking was in effect.
When the snow did finally melt, the car began to drip. Not water; the snow was GONE.
It was dripping bodily fluids from the “missing wife” of a minor mafioso and her boyfriend found in the trunk with one bullet each in their brains.
As I said, it was the neighborhood made famous in Moonstruck.
As for me, I was glad we had found cheap, safe, permanent parking under the el a few weeks before the snowstorm so we hadn't had to do the New York parking mambo. Indeed, since we had joined the parking aristocracy, it was a wonder we even noted the stack of tickets on someone else's car. No longer our worry!
It was lucky, too, that my dogs were both Type A and very goal-oriented, basically only interested in smelling other dogs’ peepee, and not any other sort of light yellow liquids they noticed on the street. But I’ve always wondered whether we might have brought some human genetic material into the apartment on our shoes, or on eight furry paws. We always crossed right about there….
But it doesn’t bear thinking about. Not when I have all of NYC left to worship, and might travel down this holy path again soon.
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