Orchard Street Connection

Was down on Orchard Street in Manhattan last evening observing Ellie getting fitted at Adriennes for her wedding gown for next month’s nuptials.

To those not familiar with Orchard Street, a little history. Located in the heart of the Lower East Side populated by waves of immigrants, especially Eastern European Jews in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century, the narrow-laned Orchard Street has always been a mecca for savvy shoppers and sharp retailers. Above the shops, immigrants lived in squalid, cramped quarters of walk-up apartments. Today hip, young people share the confines with newer immigrants. The neighborhood is gentrifying with trendy stores and restaurants.

As a child I would tag along with my father and my mother as they plied the small, merchandise-stuffed storefronts looking for bargains in apparel, textiles and electronics, all the way kibitzing with the merchants along the busy street.

Orchard Street has a long history with our family. After my father came to New York from Danzig, Poland, in 1939, he worked for his cousin Morris in a shirt store on Orchard Street. It was there one day, when he was several steps up on a ladder, that he met my mother for the first time. It was sort of a prearranged meeting, but my mother’s hair was not very cooperative that day. As family lore tells it, her hair was downright scary, so much so that when dad gazed upon her for the first time, he fell off the ladder. Nevertheless, they agreed to go out on a date that Friday night, to see an operetta, Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus. 

When he arrived at her parents’ door Friday evening he was met by an attractive young woman whom he assumed was one of her three sisters. He was only slightly embarrassed but quite relieved and happy to discover his date stood before him. They married six weeks later.

Ever the businessman my father opened his own shirt shop on Orchard Street after returning from military service in World War II. His store was at 99 Orchard Street, in the shadow of what today is the Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street. Indeed, a year or so ago the museum contacted me for information on his store as part of its research on an exhibit of businesses of the Lower East Side. I never knew of that store as I wasn't yet born when he ran it, but an older cousin who worked there provided details. As Herb explained to me, it was common back in the 1940s for my father to give a helping hand to relatives and friends who needed a first job. 

As a child, I was aware of and intrigued by my father’s familiarity with the merchants along Orchard Street. I now understand from where his knowledge derived. It seemed only fitting then that his granddaughter came full circle back to Orchard Street to choose her dress for her wedding which will take place 11 days shy of what would have been my parents’ 70th wedding anniversary.

Inspired by The Times

You’re perhaps tired of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene stories, but indulge me this one personal note.

Gilda, Ellie, Donny and I were traveling in upstate New York, in the area around Lake Placid, Saturday. It was a beautiful sunny day, with temperatures approaching 80 degrees. Had it not been for the impending landfall of Irene, we would have stayed overnight instead of driving back down to White Plains and arriving home well before the full force of the deluge hit.

It’s a good thing we didn’t sojourn upstate. Torrential rains whacked northern communities. One of the towns we drove through on Route 73, Keene, was particularly devastated. “While the damage was widespread, (Essex) County Emergency Services Director Don Jaquish said Keene and Keene Valley were hit the hardest. The Keene fire station was swept away by the floodwaters,” North Country Public Radio reported.

There truly is no escaping the wrath of Mother Nature, should she ever wish to single you out for misery.


Time to Reorder: In case you haven’t noticed by now, I’m an old-fashioned type of guy. I’m not an early technology adopter. To a fault I often resist adapting my ways to new-fangled means.

Which explains why I just turned the page in my At-A-Glance weekly pocket calendar and came across the friendly reminder it’s time to reorder for 2012. My iTouch has an electronic calendar. I just find it more comforting, convenient and calculating to use an old-fashioned paper calendar to keep track of appointments and significant dates.

I’m not alone in this allegiance to past practices. Last month The NY Times ran an article, “A Paper Calendar? It’s 2011,” that lauded the now-seeming eccentricity of non electronic record keeping (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/fashion/calendar-wars-pit-electronics-against-paper.html?scp=3&sq=pamela%20paul&st=cse).

I also walk around with a notepad in my back pocket just in case the muse descends upon me and I’m inspired to write a blog. Though I readily compose at my laptop, a goodly number of blog entries are first written in longhand. This practice presents the challenge of reading my scribble, often aided by a magnifying glass to help deduce and discern my scrawls. So if something you read doesn’t make sense, my defense is that I didn’t transcribe it correctly.

Though recently I’ve taken to keeping an electronic to-do list, I find it not as fulfilling as a paper memorandum. Either way, if a task doesn’t get on one of my lists, fuggetaboutit, it won’t get done.


Roomies: I went to a commuter college, Brooklyn College, so I never had the dorm experience of living with one or two classmates (even in graduate school the “pleasure” escaped me as I lived off-campus in a studio apartment). But I was intrigued nevertheless by an Op-Ed piece in today’s NY Times suggesting the random assignment of college dorm roommates was better than allowing freshmen to choose like-minded individuals they screened through Facebook and other social media interfaces (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/opinion/when-roommates-were-random.html?scp=1&sq=dalton%20conley&st=cse).

A sociologist and dean of social sciences at New York University, Dalton Conley asserts living with someone from a different background and culture is far more developmental than sharing a 10-foot-by-10-foot space for nine months with a clone of your beliefs and biases.

When Dan and Ellie went off to college, their roomies could not have been more different than them.

Though Dan’s best friend also was going to Tufts, they chose to accept the university’s pairings. Dan was into sports, both as a participant and a fan. He was really into The Simpsons. His roommate was Chinese, from a family that ran a restaurant in a nearby town. He’d go home weekends to help out. His physical activity consisted of drawing a bow across a violin. He’d never heard of The Simpsons. Indeed, he never watched TV.

By the end of freshman year, Dan’s roommate still played violin, still went home every weekend, but had become a Simpsons’ convert. Dan, meanwhile, had not adopted any of his mannerisms. Dan resolved to room with best friend, Eric, for the rest of college and beyond.

At Skidmore, Ellie got paired with the daughter of a minister of an independent denomination. She was not a shining disciple of his ministry. She left school before the academic year concluded. From sophomore through senior year, Ellie chose her own roomies.


Ecstasy Above: Two weeks ago Gilda and I returned for a second walk of the High Line, now that the northern part of the elevated urban park on the west side of Manhattan has opened for people gazing and perambulating. The High Line, for those not familiar with it, used to be a railroad spur along the city’s lower industrial corridor running from Gansevoort Street to West 30th Street. Abandoned for many years, it has been transformed into an aerie filled with wild flowers, benches, fountains, and bonhomie heard in the many languages that inhabit New York City.

It is hard not to smile when on the High Line. Just as hard when just thinking about it. Since its opening a year ago, it’s become a quintessential New York experience. In case you missed it, here’s a reflection on it from Sunday’s NY Times Style section: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/fashion/the-high-line-by-day-and-night-nyc.html?scp=2&sq=high%20line&st=cse

A Time for Every Purpose

My birthday is March 6. It’s not too early for those who don’t have that date circled on their 2011 calendar to do so now, though that is not the reason I am giving you six months’ notice. Rather, I am reacting to a story in this morning’s NY Times, “This Life: A Day To Dance Or Weep?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/fashion/05ThisLife.html?_r=1&hpw)

As a New Yorker, I reflect almost daily on the void in lower Manhattan where the Twin Towers stood. Now that I’m no longer commuting to an office, most days I’m listening to WCBS880 radio news as I putter around in the morning. With uncanny persistence, the announcers each day call out the time exactly at 9:11. They probably don’t realize they repeatedly are piercing the hearts of so many listeners. Perhaps no one who was not a New York area resident that fateful day nine years ago can fully appreciate the ongoing assault to our sensibilities.

The Times article raised an important point. When is it proper to return to normalcy, to celebrate happy occasions that by coincidence, or planning, fall on September 11? In a larger sense, in the context of the current debate on the building of a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, when is it proper to just...move on?

If we wanted to always dwell on the past, there are ample reasons to live a cloistered and melancholy life. A few years ago, some enterprising(?) souls put together a daily calendar listing calamities that befell Jews throughout the millennia. How comforting to know I’m part of a people with so long and rich a daily history!

When I tell people I was born on March 6, I usually say I share the date with the fall of the Alamo. I don’t mention that Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, as well as a hundred or more other Alamo defenders, died that day. I was a big Davy Crockett fan as a child. I adored Fess Parker. Even had a ‘coon-skin hat for a while.

The Alamo wasn’t the only infamous event to happen on my birthday. Of far greater import was the Missouri Compromise that President Monroe signed into law in 1820, permitting the Show Me territory to enter the Union as a slave state. Thirty-seven years later to the day, the U.S. Supreme Court issued one of its most egregious decisions. In the Dred Scott case, the court ruled, according to Wikipedia, “that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves—whether or not they were slaves—were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States. It also held that the United States Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories. The Court also ruled that because slaves were not citizens, they could not sue in court. Lastly, the Court ruled that slaves—as chattel or private property—could not be taken away from their owners without due process.” How would you like that legacy as part of your birthday heritage?

Of course, some less traumatic occurrences happened on my birthday. In 1475, Michelangelo was born. Lou Costello (1906), Alan Greenspan (1926) and Shaquille O’Neal (1972) also took their first breaths on March 6. Life ended for Louisa May Alcott (1888), John Philip Sousa (1932), Pearl S. Buck (1973), Ayn Rand (1982), Georgia O’Keeffe (1986) and many more luminaries on March 6. In short, every day has its pluses and minuses.

September 11 is no exception. Did you know that in 1609 Henry Hudson discovered Manhattan on September 11? Or that the British Mandate of Palestine began in 1922 (the Mandate might have been detested when it ended in 1948, but it was the first concrete step toward Israeli statehood). One year earlier, the first moshav (cooperative farm) was settled in Palestine. In 1978, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat came together on September 11 to sign the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt. In 1989, the first breach of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary allowed thousands of East Germans to flee repression, hastening the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies. In 2005, Israel unilaterally completed disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

On September 11, 2001, a day of crispness and bright sunshine, 2,977 innocent people were killed in the terrorist attacks. We should never forget them. We should never forget, or forgive, the murderous band that rained death on our country. But it’s time to move on. As it says in Ecclesiastes, “A season is set for everything...A time for weeping and a time for laughing, a time for wailing and a time for dancing.” Every day has its history of tragedy. Our spirit demands we infuse September 11 with added meanings, new hopes, new reasons to celebrate, not just commemorate.