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Holden's New York
Taking a Walk Through J. D. Salinger’s New York
By JAMES BARRON
Hey, listen. You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over?
There it is: the Holden Caulfield question. Sara Cedar Miller gets it all the time.
“Everybody’s read that book,” said Ms. Miller, the historian for the Central Park Conservancy. It went without saying that the book in question — the book with the question, on Page 60 — was “The Catcher in the Rye.”
And the answer, according to Ms. Miller, is that the ducks never go anywhere.
“I have no idea what J. D. Salinger was thinking,” said Ms. Miller, who remembered reading “The Catcher in the Rye” as a high school student in Sharon, Mass. “I’ve worked for the park for 26 years, and I’ve always seen ducks.” She saw them in the subfreezing cold on Thursday morning: “I photographed them sitting on the ice.”
Those ducks are perhaps the most memorable New York image in a slim little book that is full of them.
Before he went into seclusion in New Hampshire, Mr. Salinger, who died on Wednesday at 91, had a deep relationship with the city, having moved from Harlem to the Upper West Side to Park Avenue as a youngster and later to East 57th Street. As our colleague Clyde Haberman noted last year, the city itself was a character in “Catcher.”
So “Catcher” could almost serve as a guide to the city of a certain time, a city that has been lost forever, but still somehow exists: dark, enigmatic, grown up.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a cross section of New York, but it’s a cross section of what a kid like that who grew up in New York would be interested in doing,” said Peter G. Beidler, the author of “A Reader’s Companion to J. D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’” (Coffeetown Press, 2008) and a retired professor at Lehigh University. “A 40-year-old man walking around New York would see different things. But he describes the things a 16-year-old would notice.”
Salinger started with Pennsylvania Station — 58 pages after promising not to tell “where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like,” Holden Caulfield alights there and heads for a phone booth. A 16-year-old taking the train to New York nowadays would arrive in a different, less inspired place: Holden was in McKim, Mead & White’s extraordinary station, the one whose destruction in the 1960s kindled the historic preservation movement.
“One entered the city like a god,” the architecture historian Vincent Scully said. The dingy, workaday one that replaced it is no match: “One scuttles in now like a rat.”
And what modern 16-year-old would need a phone booth? Even his parents have cellphones.
Mr. Beidler made a map to go with his book that traces Holden’s perambulations around Manhattan, even to nonexistent places like the Edmont Hotel, where Holden has an awkward encounter with Sunny the hooker. Mr. Beidler places the Edmont in the West 50s, between Fifth Avenue and what is now officially known as the Avenue of the Avenues d’oh! Americas. In Holden’s day, it was just Sixth Avenue.
“Because it is in this hotel that Holden sees ‘perverts’ and later encounters a pimp and a prostitute,” Mr. Beidler wrote, “it is likely that Salinger did not want to use the name of a real hotel.” But he gave a clue: He said it was “41 gorgeous blocks” from Ernie’s nightclub in Greenwich Village. Ernie’s, too, was a made-up place.
“You kind of triangulate a little bit,” Mr. Beidler said. “He goes so many blocks away, goes here, goes there. I was always able to figure out more or less where he was.”
Holden mentions the McBurney School, a private school that Salinger had attended. After Salinger came students like the actor Henry Winkler, the television journalist Ted Koppel and the financier Bruce Wasserstein. But McBurney closed in the 1980s.
“The good thing about New York is, as much as it changes, there are so many things that never change,” said Will Hochman, a professor at Southern Connecticut State University and an author of the forthcoming “A Critical Companion to J.D. Salinger.” “I had a student who read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and told me she felt like she lived in Grand Central Terminal. I could relate that to Holden’s feelings of being lost.”
And there is a timelessness to the problems of navigating the confusing place that New York can be, with its strange streets and its stranger rhythms and rituals. “At one point Holden is worried he’s going to fall because he’s stepping off a curb,” Mr. Hochman said. “I think Salinger intended that to convey the smallness. You’re aware of how many great people are there, how many great things are there. At Ernie’s, where he’s recognized by one of his brother’s old girlfriend, he gets some status because he’s recognized but he feels belittled. In some ways New York overwhelms him.”
At another point, Holden waits near the clock at the Biltmore for his date. The Biltmore was turned into an office building more than 15 years ago, the couches where he sat, girl-watching, gone. “Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls …” Salinger wrote. “It was nice sightseeing.”
“Grand Central Terminal stands, though coin-operated lockers that Holden uses were removed long ago for security reasons,” Clyde Haberman wrote last year. “Radio City Music Hall goes on, in its fashion. For sure, so do the book’s two museums that abut Central Park — ‘the one where the pictures are’ and ‘the one where the Indians are.’ ”
As for the pond where the ducks are, long after “The Catcher In the Rye” had become the kind of forced reading in school that ruined it for so many teen-agers, there was one person who could have told Salinger that the ducks never really left.
That person was was Adrian Benepe, a longtime Parks Department official who is now the commissioner. Salinger, Mr. Benepe said, “was our immediate next-door neighbor in Cornish, N.H., where I spent part of my childhood.”
“I would have told him that the ducks don’t go anywhere in winter—they mainly stay right here and head for the Reservoir, where recently counted them.”
And the Hotel Seton, where Holden goes for a drink?
“We get high school kids coming in and asking and they want to know if it’s the Seton Hotel,” said Leslee Heskiaoff, the owner of the hotel by that name on East 40th Street. “It isn’t. We have no bar.”
Art on Cabs
Soon You Can Hail an Artist as You Hail a Cab
By CAROL VOGEL
Those moving advertisements atop taxis generally deliver not-so-subtle messages, like which airlines to fly or movies to see, who makes the sexiest blue jeans or the coolest sunglasses.
High art they most certainly are not.
But for the month of January, Show Media, a Las Vegas company that owns about half the cones adorning New York City’s taxis, has decided to give commerce a rest. Instead, roughly 500 cabs will display a different kind of message: artworks by Shirin Neshat, Alex Katz and Yoko Ono.
The project is costing Show Media about $100,000 in lost revenue, but John Amato, one of Show’s owners and a contemporary-art fan, said: “I thought it was time to take a step back. January’s a slow month. I could have cut my rates but instead I decided to hit the mute button and give something back to the city.”
He contacted the Art Production Fund, a nonprofit New York organization that presents art around the city, and asked its co-founders, Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen, to select artists. They in turn sought out Ms. Neshat, Mr. Katz and Ms. Ono, three New Yorkers known for work that can read both conceptually and physically in a confined space. (The ads measure just 14 by 48 inches.)
The project is called “Art Adds,” not just as a play on its advertising origins but also, Ms. Villareal said, because “art adds to the public’s vision.”
Each artist’s work will appear on approximately 160 cabs, and each responded to the challenge in very different ways.
Mr. Katz has taken two of his recent portraits, both of models who frequently pose for him, and put them together. One is a frontal portrait, the other the back of a woman’s head. They are set against a black background. “You can’t go wrong with black and yellow,” the artist said of the posterlike quality of the design.
Ms. Neshat, an Iranian-born artist known for her social, political and psychological commentary on women in contemporary Islamic societies, said that when she was approached about the project, her first thought was of the Pakistani- and Senegalese-born taxi drivers.
“I felt I could make work that was truly non-Western, because it’s an extension of what New York is about,” Ms. Neshat said.
She used the two sides of the so-called cones in different ways. On one there is an illustration of a handshake, the artist’s symbol of unity and solidarity. The other shows an eye decorated with a poem titled “I Feel Sorry for the Garden,” by Forough Farokhzad, a celebrated female Iranian poet. The poem itself is in Persian and written out in calligraphy in the white of the eye. “It suggests that someone is speaking to you in a language that no one can understand,” Ms. Neshat explained. “And although the poem is from the 1960s, it still resonates today.”
Ms. Ono has also drawn on a vintage idea. She used the theme “The War Is Over,” a slogan she and John Lennon used when they took their message of peace around the world in 1969-70, in this case displaying it in English and in sign language.
“It’s almost like a dance,” she said, “the way the message is always in motion.”
NYC Bans Storefront Gates
Bringing Down the Curtain on a Symbol of Blight
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
New York City’s storefront gates, like its fire escapes and stoops, are there but not quite there: the unnoticed wallpaper of New York at night. They have been battered by vandals and defaced by graffiti taggers. They have secured diamonds, handmade tortellini and other valuable commodities. They have provided the clattering soundtrack of dawn and dusk, the steel canvas of struggling artists, the most compelling evidence that the city does, indeed, sleep.
And now, on orders of the City Council, roll-down gates have joined the ranks of fatty foods and cigarette smoke: they have been legislated against, some right into extinction.
The Council voted on Monday to ban the kind of security gates that completely shield commercial storefront windows and doors from view — ones that resemble old-fashioned auto garage doors, with narrow horizontal slats that rise up like a steely sort of curtain — while permitting the kinds of gates common in suburban shopping malls that allow passers-by to see inside.
Along Court Street in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, a gentrifying commercial and residential strip in what remains an Italian stronghold, the gradual ban on solid gates — there are probably tens of thousands of them — was as well-received as a property tax hike. Not a single owner or manager who was interviewed was aware of the Council’s vote.
The head-scratching dismay expressed by Pyung Lim Lee upon learning that City Hall had taken a regulatory interest in the rickety old solid gate outside C.H. Plaza Dry Cleaners, 400 Court Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., 11231, was typical.
“If the government pays, then O.K.,” said Mr. Lee, the owner of the shop, who was not surprised to learn that the government would not, after all, be covering the cost of a new gate. “They make law, law, law, and people’s life is more difficult.”
Frank Caputo took a more nuanced approach. He is the owner of Caputo’s Fine Foods, a narrow little hub of homemade mozzarella and pastas, down the street from the church where Al Capone was married long ago. Since Caputo’s was opened by his parents in 1973, the shop has had two gates, both of them the solid, no-peeking-in type. “I was afraid that someone was going to break the glass,” said Mr. Caputo, 47.
He has had the second gate — a $4,000 model with an electric motor that allows him to turn a key or press a button to raise or lower it — for about two years, and he figured that by 2026, when the ban fully kicks in, he would need to replace it, anyway. “If they would have told me I had six months to replace it, I would have been upset,” Mr. Caputo said.
Council members said the bill, which passed 45 to 0, was intended to deter vandals from spraying graffiti on flat-surface gates, to help beautify neighborhoods and to give police officers and firefighters the ability to look inside in an emergency. The ban applies to numerous businesses, including banks, barber shops, beauty salons, health clinics, dry cleaners, dental offices and retail stores.
All businesses affected have until July 1, 2026, to install security gates that allow at least 70 percent of the area they cover to be visible. Any gates installed after July 1, 2011, must comply with the new requirements.
“We took great pains in this bill to make sure we balanced quality-of-life issues and graffiti eradication with the real-life financial challenges small businesses are facing in this recession,” said the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn. “That’s why the bill has a lengthy time frame.”
The city’s many storefronts, like their proprietors, have their own bedtime rituals. In the diamond district in Manhattan, many shops do not bother with roll-down gates: employees can be seen removing the jewelry, item by item, from the window displays, bound for parts unknown.
On one block of Court Street, the window of a barber shop with no gate afforded a full view inside (the old-fashioned cash register’s empty drawer left open and the bill holders up), but the insurance office next door seemed to contain more secrets, with a solid gate, marred by graffiti.
The metal gate covering G. Esposito & Sons’ pork store offered a peek inside, but what was visible just inside the door would probably attract only the most desperate sort of burglar: a giant apron-clad, wide-eyed piggy statue.
Karen Van Every, the owner of Serimony, a card and gift shop, has a see-through gate, which she wanted so that passers-by could look inside when the store is closed. “People walk by and they see a piece of jewelry in the window and they want to come back,” she said.
Still, Ms. Van Every, like many other Court Street merchants, said she opposed the ban because of its eventual impact on businesses’ bottom line. “Every little cost associated with having a small business could put you under,” she said.
The solid gates have a forbidding quality, recalling the bad old days of 1970s-era New York, when a desire to encourage window-shopping was superseded by a concern over rampant crime and occasional looting.
In some cases, they were no deterrent. In 1973, for example, five young burglars in the Bronx broke into a clothing store with a roll-down gate by cutting a hole in the roof.
But in other cases, solid gates might have helped. During the blackout that struck the city in the summer of 1977, looters ripped off nonsolid storefront gates by hooking chains to them, attaching the chains to cars and then stepping on the gas.
But sometimes no gate could have withstood looters’ fury during the blackout. Jonathan Mahler, in his book “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City,” described the scene in Bushwick: “They were taking crowbars to steel shutters, prying them open like tennis-ball-can tops or simply jimmying them up with hydraulic jacks and then wedging garbage cans underneath to keep them open.”
The gates, like all endangered species, have their own unique history. They have kept people in as much as out: In 2004, advocates for immigrants complained that janitors were getting trapped inside locked and gated groceries until managers arrived the next morning.
In Bushwick years ago, some graffiti-tagged gates were painted over, without charge, by New Yorkers with little choice in the matter: petty criminals sentenced to perform community service.
On Court Street, many of the solid gates are marked with graffiti, but others have been used as billboards to advertise the stores they protect. Acorn Real Estate features an image of a giant acorn; R.P.T. Physical Therapy, nearby, had an artist paint its blue logo on its gate, a silhouette of a man over the phrase, “Let Us Help You Reach Your Goals.”
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