➊NEWSSTAND ON CENTER ISLAND TRIANGLE (Broadway between 71st and 72nd Streets)—In the 1940s thirteen-year-old Noam Chomsky would take the train to New York City to visit relatives, patronize the Fourth Avenue used bookstores downtown, and hang out at this newsstand with its owner—his uncle. His uncle had the rounding of the back known as hunchback and got the job selling newspapers through a special program for the disabled. The catch was that the newsstand was located in an unfavorable position, as far away from commuters passing by, so the uncle turned it into a lively literary and political space for Jewish professionals and intellectual émigrés. This would be a significant influence on Noam’s left-wing political views.
An expert in the field of linguistics, Noam has taught at M.I.T. for 50 years. He became a major anti-Vietnam War speaker and activist in the 1960s. He supported draft resistance and bunked with Norman Mailer in jail in 1967 after the march on the Pentagon that was the subject of Mr. Mailer’s book The Armies of the Night. He has written over 90 books in his lifetime, many criticizing U.S. foreign policy for its murderous invasions as well as the hypocritical corporate media coverage of those wars. One of his most famous quotes is “If the Nuremburg laws were applied, then every postwar American president would have been hanged.” The movie Manufacturing Consent (1993) offers a great overview of his life.
Broadway and 73rd Street served as the southern border of a giant Jesse Jackson for President Rally in 1988 during his historic campaign.
➋THE ANSONIA (2109 Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets)—It is no accident that this building is still a major landmark on the Upper West Side over 100 years after it was constructed. William Earle Dodge Stokes was the owner when the hotel was built in 1904 and he made it as fancy as possible. It had a grand ballroom, a fountain in the lobby with live seals, a Turkish bath, and the world’s largest indoor swimming pool. It also featured a zoo on the roof from which fresh eggs were given to the tenants each morning. There were 500 chickens, a duck, goats and a bear but the city closed it down after a few years. Mr. Stokes was also the owner of the infamous Phelps-Dodge Copper and Manufacturing Company, which had many strikes organized against it, the most recent occurring from 1983–1986.
Some of the famous guests who made extended stays here include Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Arturo Toscanini, Igor Stravinsky, and writers Elmer Rice and Theodore Dreiser. In 1919 the meeting between mafia members and the Chicago White Sox players to fix the World Series took place here, engineered by noted mobster Arnold Rothstein.
In the 1970s the Ansonia housed a gay bathhouse known as the Continental Baths, where an unknown Bette Midler had a large following. She was accompanied by a thenunknown Barry Manilow on piano. The gay bathhouse was replaced by a notorious heterosexual swing club called Plato’s Retreat, which featured a 60-person Jacuzzi, cheap Quaaludes, and a clothing-optional dance floor. The owner of the Ansonia eventually paid them $1 million to leave and they moved to 34th Street but eventually closed due to the AIDS crisis in 1985.
Though originally built as a hotel, it has long been rental apartments and in 1990 converted to condominiums. During the transition period there were numerous rent strikes and protests against the building’s decay, resulting in tenants getting it landmarked in 1972. In 2011, a 17th-floor tenant in the famous rounded, turret apartment put a red neon-lit peace sign in the window, causing complaints from many nearby tenants. If you want an inside look at the Ansonia watch the 1992 movie Single White Female starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. Otherwise you’ll have to pay $1 million to purchase a one-bedroom apartment.
The Ansonia. PHOTO BY BRUCE KAYTON
➌MARCEL DUCHAMP’S APARTMENT HOUSE (33 West 67th Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West)—Mr. Duchamp (1887–1968) moved to New York City permanently in 1942 and became a U.S. citizen in 1954. He overturned the staid and commercial art world with his abstract and cubist paintings. In 1912, he finished his most famous painting, “Nude Descending a Staircase,” which the New York Times called, very shortsightedly, “an explosion in a shingle factory.” It would become world famous after being displayed in America at the Armory Show of 1913 on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th streets. Mr. Duchamp lived temporarily in this building in the 1910s, paying just $58 per month, and hanging out with William Carlos Williams, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Carl Van Vechten. He loved Greenwich Village and in 1917 took part in the occupation of the Washington Square Arch by declaring the “Independent Republic of Greenwich Village.” Also in 1917, he took part in another great art show at the Grand Central Palace (Lexington Avenue between 46th and 47th Streets) and its planning occurred in Mr. Duchamp’s apartment. It was the biggest art show ever in America and was organized as an opposition to the art establishment. Mr. Duchamp, true to his Dadaist beliefs, submitted an upside-down urinal under a pseudonym. It was rejected by the show but became famous later on, along with many other ready-made objects. Mr. Duchamp became an expert chess player, once ranked in the top 25 in the United States, and lived at various addresses in the Village, including 28 East 10th Street and the top floor of 210 West 14th Street (1943–1965). He was later a big influence on Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and John Cage. He died in 1968 and his ashes were buried in his family’s plot in his native France.
Also living at this address in the 1910s and 1920s was the book and magazine illustrator James Montgomery Flagg. While Mr. Duchamp first came to New York City in 1915 to get away from the nationalism and patriotism of World War I France, Mr. Flagg became famous during World War I for his American recruiting poster showing the fictional Uncle Sam saying “I Want You for the U.S. Army.” I always enjoyed the left-wing version of this slogan in a mock ad with Uncle Sam saying “Travel to exotic places and kill people there.” Mr. Flagg described this block as nice on the north side while the south side had “disreputable tenements” and a saloon known for stabbings and “women’s raucous yells.”
➍BROADWAY BETWEEN 66TH AND 68TH STREETS—I usually give a talk about zoning and the Upper West Side while standing on the eastern side of Broadway and looking west, toward the skyscrapers that went up in the 1990s, housing all of this year’s fashionable retailers. My reference is the late Robert Fitch’s excellent book, The Assassination of New York (1993). It features a great picture of David Rockefeller sitting in a bulldozer labeled “Chase” (for the bank) as it destroys New York City’s landscape. The book was inspired by an interview Bob did with a New York City official who said the underlying reasons for New York City’s fiscal problems of the 1970s “are the fucking Blacks and Puerto Ricans.” Of course you could quote city officials complaining about “the fucking Jews, Italians, Polish, Irish, etc.” in earlier decades of New York City history. But Bob looked a little deeper into the planned shrinkage of services in New York City along with policies purposely designed to keep blue-collar workers out and white-collar workers in. In 1958, David Rockefeller was head of the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association that sought to eliminate the port, produce markets, and all local industries from Canal Street to the Battery and give tax subsidies to expensive office skyscrapers. In the 1970s the Rockefeller family pushed for this same kind of development for the west side of Manhattan. In the late 1980s more than 9 million square feet of office space was created, with billions of dollars of tax abatements. Throughout the city during this period the Rockefellers pushed for Lincoln Center, Rockefeller University, Chase Manhattan Plaza, Morningside Heights, Westway (a rare defeat for the ruling elite), the South Street Seaport, the Javits Center, and the World Trade Center. The luxury apartments of Battery Park City received an $86.8 million tax exemption and the late World Trade Center, an empty white elephant for many years, received a tax exemption of $71.7 million. By 2004 there was 15 million square feet of empty office space in Manhattan. From 2009 to 2014 the office space vacancy rate for Manhattan varied from 9.5 percent to 13 percent.
➎LINCOLN CENTER (Columbus Avenue between 63rd and 64th Streets)—The largest performing arts complex in the United States was built from 1962 to 1968 at a cost of $185 million, over $40 million of which was government funding. (I always think of this figure, along with the subsequent hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies over the years, when I and other protesters get thrown off of the premises of this complex by taxpayer-funded police officers.) This was part of a “slum-clearance” project by New York City Dictator-in-Chief Robert Moses and the Rockefellers. Overall, 400 buildings were knocked down over a 13-block area. Lincoln Center displaced 800 businesses and 7,000 largely Black and Puerto Rican families, something Moses couldn’t do in a wealthy white neighborhood (which this has ironically become). Moses started demolition work on the project while lawsuits were still pending as part of a “psychological warfare” campaign to move tenants out of their neighborhood. Moses claimed 4,400 new apartments would be built as part of the larger Lincoln Square Project but over 90 percent of these apartments were luxury apartments and nothing could make up for the breakup of the fabric of the neighborhood. There was also a lot of corruption between the local Democratic Party organization and the real estate industry resulting in millions in bribes.
Lincoln Center. PHOTO BY BRUCE KAYTON
So what did this neighborhood look like before Moses and the Rockefellers destroyed it, you ask? Just rent a DVD copy of West Side Story, which filmed outdoor scenes in the abandoned tenements after tenants were evicted but before the buildings were razed. I always thought the filmmakers should have been required to put pictures of the tenants on the ground as the actors danced and sang over them.
The theater to the left was renamed the David H. Koch Theater in 2008 after Koch pledged $100 million in renovation costs over a ten-year period. Yes, that’s “Koch” as in “The Koch Brothers,” financiers of some of the most racist, conservative, climate-change-denying politicians in the United States.
In 1981 several thousand protesters, sponsored by the Northern Aid Committee, loudly condemned English royalty as Prince Charles was attending various Royal Ballet events. Some protesters interrupted the performance of Sleeping Beauty inside with shouts of “Charles is the Prince of Death.” Irish hunger strikers had died earlier in the year but this didn’t stop the Prince from dining later on Malcolm Forbes’ 126-foot yacht, where more protesters greeted him at the South Street Seaport. Thousands of city cops guarded this remnant of feudalism at a cost of $300,000 in overtime alone.
The Lincoln Square Movie Theater on Broadway and 68th Street was the busiest movie theater in the country in the 1990s.
➏9TH STREET BOAT BASIN (Riverside Park–enter at 72nd Street entrance to the park)—At the entrance to Riverside Park is one of the few female statues in New York City: a tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt.
This boat basin was built in 1937 and includes over 40 fulltime residents living on their boats. There was a trend in the 1980s and 1990s where newly-divorced men lived here as the wives got the house and the husbands got the boat. Some of those who have anchored their boats here over the years include former Young Lord Geraldo Rivera, Malcolm Forbes, Frank Sinatra, and Mario Puzo (in a boat named Godfather). Paul McCartney was once here with his family for a charter boat trip and he started playing his guitar on the dock. In an “only in New York” moment, one of the full-time residents yelled at him to be quiet. There have been rent strikes here over the years and the city has let the basin become very rundown, though they claim it loses money.
Riverside Park was designed in 1875 by Frederick Law Olmsted but doubled in size under the watch of Robert Moses. However, he spent four times as much money from 72nd Street to 110th Street as he spent for the Harlem section north of 110th Street. Some of those who played here as kids include J.D. Salinger, Bennet Cerf, David O. Selznick, and Robert Oppenheimer. Sam Melville (see Lower East Side II Tour) used to play basketball here as well.
In 1913 famous escape artist Harry Houdini swam to this dock after being purposely locked in a cell in a prison ship that was anchored offshore. In 1912 he had escaped from a nailed-shut pine box that was dumped into New York Harbor off of Governor’s Island. This last action made him a star and he was soon earning $1,000 per week by recreating the stunt in a water tank in a theater. Houdini would also pull into a town and insist that the police handcuff him in a cell, from which he would promptly escape, earning more publicity. In some cities the local police would shut down his act and put him in jail, but he would always escape and leave town unharmed. From 1904 to 1926, Houdini, whose real name was Ehrich Weiss, lived at 278 West 113th Street. He spent the end of his life exposing fake mediums who claimed to be communicating with the dead. Houdini died in 1926 at the age of 52 from a ruptured appendix.
In 1944 a famous murder occurred in the park involving the Beats from Columbia University. Lucien Carr was a student at the university and a mentor to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. David Kammerer was a gay friend of Carr who became obsessed with him, though Carr was not gay himself. Kammerer threatened him and his girlfriend after a night of drinking at local bars and then attacked Carr inside the park at 116th Street. Carr killed Kammerer by stabbing him with a Boy Scout knife and then tied weights to his body and dumped him in the river. Carr would then go to William S. Burroughs’ apartment and then to Kerouac’s to ask them what he should do. Two days later Carr turned himself in to the police and was charged with second-degree murder, serving time in a reformatory. Kerouac and Burroughs were briefly jailed for failing to report the crime. Lucien Carr went on to become the Washington Bureau Chief for United Press International and had a famous son named Caleb, who wrote a bestselling book called The Alienist.
Exit the park at 79th Street to continue to the next stop.
➐APTHORP APARTMENTS (2211 Broadway between 78th and 79th Streets)—No political history here but this is one of the great landmarked buildings of the Upper West Side. It’s named for Charles Ward Apthorpe (with an extra “e”), who purchased this land in 1763. In 1879 the land was sold to the infamous Astor family and the building was completed in 1908 for William Waldorf Astor. The late Nora Ephron, the screenwriter of the anti-nuclear movie Silkwood and ex-wife of Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, lived here at one time until receiving a 400 percent rent increase.
➑MAXIM GORKY AND THE BELLECLAIRE HOTEL (250 West 77th Street and Broadway)—Maxim Gorky, the famous Russian novelist, had a short stay at this hotel in 1906, which turned out to be a scandal. Gorky was an activist against the Russian government during the unsuccessful revolution of 1905. He came to New York to raise money for his fellow political activists and was doing well until the Russian government tipped off a local newspaper that the woman he was staying with was not his wife. Gorky was separated from his wife back in Russia and had been living with the woman he brought to America, actress Maria Andreyeva. However, he couldn’t get a divorce in Russia and the negative publicity caused the owners of the Belleclaire Hotel to evict him. Ultimately, he settled in the A Club at One Fifth Avenue in the Village but he raised very little of the money he had originally expected to. Gorky returned to Russia in 1913 but eventually grew more and more critical of the Bolshevik regime and left again in 1921. He would be buried in the Kremlin Wall after dying in 1936.
The building was erected in 1903 and has been owned by three generations of the Horn family. In the 1980s the Horn family was notorious for being slumlords who charged the city outrageous rates to house the homeless in various substandard hotels around the city. They also owned the Esmor Correctional Services Corporation, a private-prison company with a long record of violations and a bribery scandal with New York City politicians.
The Hotel Belleclaire was also used in Woody Allen’s movie Bananas, where he played a guerrilla leader from the fictional Caribbean nation of San Marcos. This character was actually based on Fidel Castro, the subject in real life of a site below.
➒2244 BROADWAY (80th–81st Street)—This was the address of Broadway Baby, a chic baby boutique which was managed by former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn (under an assumed name) in 1979 and 1980. Ms. Dohrn was working with the Black Liberation Army at the time and would duplicate customers’ IDs at the store to use to rent vehicles used in armed robberies. Though Ms. Dohrn turned herself in on outstanding warrants in 1980, receiving probation, a connection to the store arose when arrests were made for the infamous failed Brink’s armored car robbery in Nyack, New York in 1981. The connection of identifications from this store to cars used in several robberies was discovered by authorities after the Nyack disaster. Ms. Dohrn was subpoenaed and served seven months in jail for bravely refusing to testify or give handwriting samples to the grand jury investigating the Brink’s robbery. At the time she lived with future husband Bill Ayers at 520 West 123rd Street, apartment 5W. They would marry in 1982.
When the Brink’s robbery happened in 1981, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert received long, vindictive prison sentences and their one-year-old child, Chesa, was subsequently raised by Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn. Ms. Boudin was living at 50 Morningside Drive (corner of 115th Street) at the time with a reporter named Rita Jensen, who didn’t know Boudin’s real identity. Ms. Boudin would volunteer at the Children’s Free School at 560 West 113th Street on behalf of Ms. Jensen and work for a catering service that, among other jobs, served food at the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. Ms. Boudin would be released from prison in 2003. Mr. Ayers worked as a teacher at BJ’s Kids, a daycare center at P.S. 9 (100 West 84th Street).
Judy Clark, who was driving a getaway car and was captured during the Brink’s robbery in Nyack, is still in jail after Governor Cuomo refused to pardon her in 2014. She lived at 243 West 98th Street (at Broadway) from 1978 to 1981 and left behind an infant after being arrested. Ms. Clark’s apartment was searched by police after the Brink’s robbery along with apartments at 201 West 97th Street and 302 West 12th Street. Ms. Clark had previously attended P.S. 87 on West 78th Street and Stuyvesant High School, when it was at 345 East 15th Street.
➓FIDEL CASTRO (155 West 82nd Street, east of Amsterdam Avenue)—In 1948 Fidel Castro lived in this brownstone for three or four months before driving to Miami for his honeymoon with his second wife, Mirta Diaz-Balart. Fidel’s new brother-in-law, Rafael Diaz-Balart, lived here and eventually rented him a room at this address until Fidel ran out of money. Some say he was looking into postgraduate school at Columbia University. He also bought a fancy 1947 Lincoln Continental car, which he would use to drive to Miami. He would run out of money while on his honeymoon and have to receive money from his family to finish his Miami trip.
Fidel would return to the United States in 1955 on a fundraising trip, landing in Miami and traveling up and down the East Coast. He spent three weeks in the New York City Metropolitan Area but was unsuccessful at raising money in the U.S. In April 1959, just a few short months after the successful Cuban Revolution, he returned to the U.S. and visited the Bronx Zoo, the United Nations, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and Meet the Press, and spoke at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Fidel had a contentious meeting with Vice-President Nixon (President Eisenhower avoided him) and he also visited the Queens elementary school his son (“Fidelito”) had been secretly attending. In 1960 he made his famous stay at the Hotel Theresa (see Harlem Tour). In 1995 Fidel spoke at the United Nations, visited a restaurant in the Bronx, and spoke at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He was shunned by President Clinton and Mayor Giuliani. In 2000 Fidel spoke at Riverside Church in New York to an overflow crowd of 2,500. He had come to the U.S. to speak at the U.N. Millennium Summit.
⓫JAMIL ABDULLAH AL-AMIN (formerly H. Rap Brown) and 173 West 85th Street (between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues)—Mr. Al-Amin, one of the leaders of the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, was charged with trying to rob the Red Carpet Lounge, a local bar at this address in 1971. He was with three friends from St. Louis and was initially charged with shooting a police officer after he had fled the bar. Mr. Al-Amin ran out of the bar and ended up in a shootout with police at 102 West 85th Street. Bullets were flying in all directions on 85th Street, and Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Police Officer Ralph Minetta shot Mr. Al-Amin twice in the stomach after claiming that he pointed a gun at him. Mr. Al-Amin’s life was saved at Roosevelt Hospital and William Kunstler would represent him at his trial. He was convicted in April 1973 and sentenced to 5-15 years for robbery, assault, and possession of a weapon (attempted murder of a police officer was dropped). The judge gave him a shorter sentence due to his civil rights work as chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. Mr. Al-Amin said he was working to clear the neighborhood of drug dealers at the bar and was not taking part in a robbery. He had converted to Islam earlier that year and was working with local Muslims in the neighborhood to oppose drug dealers and the police who supported them.
The bar that H. Rap Brown robbed. PHOTO BY BRUCE KAYTON
Mr. Al-Amin would eventually move to Atlanta, open a grocery store, and become a Muslim leader. In 2002, at the age of 58, he was given a life sentence for killing a Fulton County sheriff’s deputy. He was constantly followed by the government while in Atlanta and the F.B.I. would write 44,000 pages of documents on him during a six-year period in the 1990s, resulting in not a single charge being filed against him. A statement of support during his murder trial was signed by Howard Zinn, Amiri Baraka, Earl Caldwell, Reverend Benjamin Chavis Muhammad, Julian Bond, Pete Seeger, John Edgar Wideman, and Muriel Tillinghast.
⓬WEST PARK PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (165 West 86th Street)—Built in 1890, this Romanesque Revival church was where Arthur Cafiero, a homeless man, froze to death outside the church in January 2003 in one of the richest cities in the world. He had just turned 60 years old and was well known to the church community, which held a special memorial service for him. Mr. Cafiero had been sleeping outside of the church for three years and lived in the neighborhood for over thirty years. He sometimes sang in the church choir. He had a drinking problem and had turned his back on the 9 to 5 work world. He was hospitalized the month before his death with high blood pressure, pneumonia, and hypothermia. The church had fought to allow the homeless to sleep on their steps after the city had tried to throw them off.
In 2011, about sixty Occupy Wall Street activists slept in the church after being evicted from Zuccotti Park. However, after a couple of thefts in the church they were forced out, though the reverend said he still supported the Occupy Wall Street movement.
⓭ST. GREGORY THE GREAT CHURCH (144 West 90th Street)—In 1970, at a priest’s apartment in the church, Philip Berrigan and David Eberhardt were arrested after having gone underground following their arrest as members of the Catonsville Nine. In 1968, Eberhardt, Berrigan and seven others broke into the Catonsville, Maryland Draft Board, carrying out file drawers to the parking lot and pouring blood on them. They then waited to be arrested.
At this church the priest had negotiated with the F.B.I. to let Philip and his brother Daniel give a speech that night and then be arrested afterward. Daniel rightfully didn’t trust the F.B.I. and didn’t show up but Eberhardt and Phil were doublecrossed and arrested before they could speak. One hundred F.B.I. agents surrounded the church to make the arrest in the afternoon though both antiwar activists were able to meet with the Young Lords before the arrest.
Another famous action he organized was invading a nuclear weapons plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where he hammered on nuclear nosecones. The movie version was made with Martin Sheen while he was out on bail and directed by the late great Emile DeAntonio. Philip Berrigan died in December 2002 at the age of 79 from liver and kidney cancer. He was arrested over 100 times in his lifetime and was married to fellow activist nun Elizabeth McAlister. He had three children. He died in Jonah House in Maryland, which he founded, and his final statement included: “I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself.”
The church itself is scheduled to close as part of cutbacks throughout New York City as church-going continues to decline (Go Science!!). Babe Ruth married his second wife here in 1929. Mr. Ruth lived at 345 West 88th Street.