Green-Wood: Where the Dead Go in Brooklyn

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn occupies the highest point in that famed borough and the site of the Revolutionary War Battle of Brooklyn.  From the grounds, one can see the Statue of Liberty in the harbor to the west.  Now a National Historic Landmark and on the Registry of Historic Places, Green-Wood was founded in 1838 by Henry Evelyn Pierrepont, a Brooklyn social leader. Among the first subscribers was the Van Ness family, who were descended from very early Dutch settlers and were the ancestors of my beloved mother-in-law, Ruth Van Ness Clark.  Ruth’s remains now repose among those beautiful rolling hills.

A tourist attraction for more than 150 years, Green-Wood now draws half a million visitors a year.  It boasts a magnificent chapel designed by Warren and Wetmore, who also designed Grand Central Terminal.  Many of the most famous and infamous New Yorkers are buried there, including Boss Tweed, Theodore Roosevelt Sr, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Leonard Bernstein.  At this moment in spring, it is glorious with blossoming trees and still gorgeous despite the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Sandy.  Here are photos taken this past Monday, when I played hooky and went on a delightful jaunt there with my friend Jay and left some spring flowers for Ruth.

Grave of Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Here is a movement from one of Gottschalk's symphonies in case you need an introduction to his music.

A Van Ness family mausoleum.  Not from our branch of the family.

 

Ruth is buried somewhere among those small tombstones in the background. Not so ritzy a place, but also not so cosmologically confused.

Memorial to the Battle of Brooklyn

Very simple grave marker for Leonard Bernstein and here is a clip of his music to go with the red white and blue.

Now just some random shots to show you how lovely and interesting Green-Wood is:

Annamaria Alfieri

A Police Story: Diary of a Dirty Cop

I had worked the four-by-twelve tour the night before. Early afternoon on October 21, 1971, I awake in my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, alone and hung-over. The four-to-midnight tour always extends till 4 a.m., the last four hours spent in Cal’s Bar on East Fifth Street, next door to the 9th Precinct (The Nine, as we say) where I’m assigned as a Patrolman. I punch on the TV for the news and there is my Police Academy classmate, my buddy, Eddie Droge. He’s in the witness stand testifying before the Knapp Commission, which has been investigating corruption in the New York City Police Department for the past year. I’m transfixed. Eddie still has that youthful appearance, he’s in his mid-20’s. The only addition to the baby-face is a pencil-thin mustache above his lip.

Four years earlier, Eddie and I were rookie cops in training at the New York City Police Academy on East 20th Street. The off-whiteish-colored building, built in the early-60’s, looked like it was undercover as a four-story parking garage. We had been sworn in as Probationary Patrolmen on May 15, 1967: me, Eddie and 250 other young men. No women (Their Day had yet to come). Eddie and I were assigned to ‘Company 67-17,’ our class designation, like a Home Room in high school. We were 43 boys from Brooklyn: seven blacks (Nobody was ‘African-American’ in those days), seventeen Italians, six Irish, three Jews, two Poles, two Germans, one Puerto Rican, and five of indeterminate European extraction.

There were four other companies, their complements of recruits also assigned by their Boroughs of residence. We were all young, nobody older than 30 and most younger. I was probably typical, at age 26. Eddie Droge was atypical at age 20. In fact, while we entered the Academy together, he was not sworn in till he reached the minimum age of 21, three days after we’d all taken the oath. Many of us had served in the military before joining the Department. It was 1967, Vietnam in full swing. Becoming a cop pretty much guaranteed you a waiver from the Draft. Eddie had not been in the Service, had a wife and three children, and had come straight from a job with Bell Telephone.

The Police Academy curriculum and intensive drill in the use of the ‘Baton’ (the Nightstick) and the Use of Deadly Force (the Gun) was supposed to last six months. It didn’t. On June 15, after four weeks of training, we all went to field commands throughout the City, having been hastily “qualified” with the Service Revolver—the City anticipated a “hot summer” (riots), a thing it anticipated with regularity in those days.

Eddie Droge and I ended up in the old 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, home to a large enclave of the Satmar sect of the Hasidim. I came to know Eddie as we patrolled in RMPs or walked adjacent foot-posts on Lee and Bedford Avenues, the main commercial streets around which the Hasidic residences clustered. We referred to the Hasids as “Beards” and believed without question the rumor that we had been sent to Williamsburg to save the Beards from their black and Hispanic neighbors: who, at sundown on Shabbos, would swoop down on bicycles and snatch the hats off the heads of Hasid males as they walked to Synagogue. Long fur hats of mink and fox tail—Spodiks—that cost about $1,000.

These were my thoughts as I watched Eddie testifying before the Knapp Commission. I learned later that he had been caught red-handed taking a $300 bribe to deep-six the case of a drug dealer he’d arrested earlier that year on the streets of Crown Heights. Unbeknownst to Eddie that day, in the Men’s Room at the Brooklyn Criminal Courts on Schermerhorn Street, their conversation was being recorded. Knapp investigators had persuaded the dealer to wear a wire. Eddie was allowed to resign from the NYPD without criminal prosecution in return for his depiction of the systemic, from-the-bottom-up corruption within the ranks of the NYPD. By Eddie’s account, his partners in the 80th Precinct spent a lot of their time chasing down gamblers and dealers to shake them down for protection money (known as “putting them on the pad”).

Back then when Eddie and I were rookies, it was not unheard of for street cops to take money. Hell, everybody took money. For most of us, it was a $5 tip for both you and your partner from a City Marshal to keep the peace at the scene of an eviction. A ‘pound’ and free meal for standing a fixed post in front of Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant on Second Avenue because the Precinct Captain had a ‘contract’ with the owner. A sawbuck apiece to accompany the manager of the Fillmore East to the bank with the nightly take. It was viewed as a Gentlemen’s Agreement: a gratuity offered and bad manners to refuse. Of course, it did get out of hand; witness Eddie Droge. Eddie did what he had to do to avoid jail. Cops don’t ‘jail’ well.

Happy ending, though. Eddie became a teacher, got his PhD from Harvard, published his autobiography, “Patrolman: A Cop’s Story.” Lives in Massachusetts now.

Maybe I’ll give him a shout, talk about the Good Times.

Danger in the Depths of Manhattan

Could the Killer Be the Mud?

The limos and cabs picked up and deposited their fur-clad passengers over on Park Avenue, local dwellers headed for Bergdorf, Tiffany's, the Colony Club and the glitzy bars downtown.

Nannies walked their charges in elegant strollers that cost more than their own modest housing rentals in the burbs.

Dogs of every breed, color and size ran in orderly, well-fed packs, with handlers from the elite high schools cheering them on to the next rest spot, in front of smiling doormen.

Little did they know that only a few blocks east, a fifty-one year-old construction worker from Lyndhurst, New Jersey, was fighting for his life, a struggle so death-threatening the New York Fire Department brought a chaplain to the man, trying to ease his agony, if he had to make the ultimate sacrifice.

The worker was stuck waist deep, almost 100 feet beneath Second Avenue, where frigid water and mud were churning into a "slushy tomb" to take him to his death.

The worker had lost his footing in a tunnel near 95th Street, less than four blocks away from the tony life on Park Avenue!

While the richbitches went about their safe, cozy lives, the hypothermic subway construction worker's life was touch and go in the thick and viscous mud below the ground, that threatened the best resources of the New York Fire Department, the anxious crews of paramedics, the chaplain and the scores of valiant subway workers.

They pulled in every known resource of the great urbanopolis—a pulley system, a backhoe, a manual griphoist machine—and the sweat and courage of over 150 firefighters, who "crouched in the slop to dig him out by hand."

Terrified not only of drowning, but of being swallowed whole by clay and mud, the man was finally rescued after his four hours of hell, accompanied by several firefighters who also suffered injuries in the same mud.

One of the main improvisations of the rescuers was to set up an intravenous tube in the mess and find a way to warm the victim.

Veterans of subway construction beneath New York's streets and waterways are always alert to the dangers that face workers underground.

But rarely had an urban rescue involved such ferocious enemies as mud, muck, man-made caverns, mattings, plywood, concrete, wall-bracing bars, ropes and suction.

But it was the mud that they recalled most. "As soon as I started walking down there, it felt like your boot was going to rip off your foot," a fire fighter said.

The muck had such a grip on the worker that as the firefighters finally pulled him free of the muck it pulled a bunch of his ligaments.

Reports that the New Jersey worker is on the road to recovery show crime does not always pay, even if the criminal is the underbelly of nature.

Perhaps one of my colleagues who writes those wonderful novels about man versus nature, like WABC's Bill Evans, will take on this story!

Maybe even YOU, my dear reader!

Thelma Straw( who lives two blocks away from the evil mud!)

What do you want to be when you grow up?

A nice lady interviewed me the other day and wanted to know what I might have liked to be if I weren't a writer. When I was ten years old, I said, I wanted to be a ballerina. And there are a number of other choices I feel I would like to have made, now that I'm grown up: opera singer, movie director. But I have no noticeable physical grace, no voice, and no Hollywood connections.

The one thing I never wanted to grow up to do was anything that involved making a lot of money. I don't know why that is. I like spending money; I like having money. But there always seemed to me to be something nasty about making money.

Being a ballerina is the anti-rich person choice. Dancers have even less chance than writers of ever making a buck. All the dancers I ever knew were broke all the time. But I tell you what. A great dancer, or even a moderately good dancer, has something that no amount of money can ever buy, and that's the ability to create fantastic, ephemeral beauty just by showing up and moving around. Mere rich people can't do that. It's not even a gift. It's an ability dearly bought with hours of arduous daily practice.

Some years ago Harold and I attended Celtic Week at the Ashokan music camp in the wild woods of New York State. He took his famous Irish fiddle, of course, and I brought my English concertina, which I play about as clumsily as I dance. There was dancing. There were serious dancers. Several of them put on a show on the last evening. I was particularly struck by one, a dark-haired girl doing charming things with a red chiffon scarf. She looked like the queen of the world.

Next day I ran into her in the parking lot as we were packing up to go. We chatted, and she revealed that she had no way to get home to New York City and no money for a cab. I was stunned. "I could never do that," I said, by which I meant go somewhere for the sake of art and create ecstatic beauty with no way to get home again.

She thought I was criticizing her for her lifestyle, but it wasn't that at all. I was dumb with admiration. Dancers. They're like butterflies. Seriously, would you sooner be a dancer or a hedge fund manager?

And speaking of ephemeral beauty, Amazon is offering the first episode of BUCKER DUDLEY, which I put up on Kindle this week, for free to Kindle owners. If you don't have a Kindle, leave a halfway cogent comment on this or another of my blog posts over the next couple of weeks and I'll put your name in the hat for the drawing. I'm going to be giving away a Kindle.

Kate Gallison

Photo Essay: Evita's Clothes

Deadline for Strange Gods: May 1.  I am going to make it.  So with no time to spare, I present some photos, many taken at the Evita Museum in Buenos Aires while researching Blood Tango.  BT launches on June 25th and features Evita, her dressmaker, and her body double.

Annamaria Alfieri