Piecework

Coney Island is still there, of course. But in the summertime now, the girls don’t dance beside the pool at Oceantide or pick up boys at Raven Hall. There is no line at Mary’s Sandwich Shop. Nobody is at the bar at Scoville’s, where my father and his friends did their drinking, or at McCabe’s, where the younger crowd did theirs. Nobody listens to bands at Feltman’s. You hear no laughter at Steeplechase the Funny Place, nor will you see sailors and squealing girls strapped together into the parachute ride. They’re all dead or gone. I remember being in Coney Island the day that Luna Park burned to the ground. The year was 1944. I ^wasa boy. But there was a sudden stirring on the beach, a movement away from the surf to the boardwalk, and then great clouds of black smoke piling into the cobalt sky. You could hear voices: Luna Park’s on fire. People were running then, and we could hear the sirens of the Fire Department and saw high arcs of water rising in a beautiful way and falling into the flames. Reporters were there and photographers with Speed Graphics, all of them wearing hats with press cards stuck in the rims, just as they did in the movies. We watched for hours, drawn as New Yorkers always are to the unity of disaster, and saw the rides and buildings collapse into black, wet rubble until there was no more Luna Park. The next day, we read all about it in the newspapers, and I felt for the first time that peculiar New York sensation: Something that was once in the world is now gone forever.

There is a photograph by Weegee, taken on V-E Day, 1945, that shows a man working at a newsstand. We can see three daily newspapers: the Journal-American, the World-Telegram, and PM; the magazines are Liberty, Air News, Argosy, Song Parade, American, Judy’s, Crack Detective, Phantom Detective, Cartoon Digest, American Astrology, White’s Radio, Magazine Digest, Popular Science, Mechanix Illustrated, Die Hausfrau, and Die Welt (must’ve been a Yorkville newsstand). We cannot see some other New York dailies that were publishing that year: the Herald Tribune and the Mirror, and in the outer boroughs, the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Times-Union, the Bronx Home-News, the Long Island Press, the Long Island Star-Journal. They are now all dead, as is every other publication on that newsstand except Popular Science and American Astrology. It’s one of the saddest photographs I’ve ever seen.

Around the time the newspapers began to die, the older New York started giving way to the new. Television was changing everything. Within a decade of its triumph in the mid-fifties, it killed the nightclubs and supper clubs: the Latin Quarter, the Stork, El Morocco, the Copa, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, the Astor Roof, Ben Maksik’s out in Queens, the Elegante in Brooklyn (where I once saw a smashed Judy Garland perform for a roomful of gangsters), the Château Madrid, Sammy’s Bowery Follies (which biographer Herbert Lottman tells us Albert Camus enjoyed so much, on his only trip to New York, that he had A. J. Liebling take him back twice), Nick’s in the Village, Tony Pastor’s, all the West 4th Street strip joints like the Heat Wave (run by Tony Bender), to mention only a few. Lindy’s, made famous by Damon Runyon, wasn’t a nightclub, but it was a night place, full of columnists (the old three-dotters), press agents, gangsters, and show-business people, and it survived into the early sixties. For a while near the end, I worked for the Post outside the place in a radio car with photographer Artie Pomerantz and once saw Walter Winchell do a tap dance on the sidewalk. The old bebop palaces on 52nd Street turned into strip joints (Ah, Lily St Cyr! O, Winnie Garrett! And where is Evelyn West and her Treasure Chest?) and then fell before the developers. Bill Miller’s Riviera, across the North River under the George Washington Bridge, was locked up one morning, then had its doors nailed shut, and was finally torn down. Even Birdland closed. Many of these places were velvet-roped dives, run by wiseguy veterans of the Prohibition wars; to drop into the Copa upon a winter’s eve was to risk an arrest for consorting. Some peddled junk and women; a few provided floating crap games in nearby hotels; they clipped customers, abused or exploited too many of the performers. But they had energy and color and a certain brutal style, and when they vanished, something went out of New York.