Questions, Comments, Observations

(Originally published 10/17/21)

Once upon a time, a college history professor of mine repeatedly queried his students during lectures, “Any questions, comments, observations?” Invariably, there would be none. Despite it being an interesting course, “Great Issues in European History,” the class consisted of mostly engineering, business, and other non-history majors enrolled in it as an elective. It did not matter that the prof had stellar teaching credentials and a background that complemented the intriguing subject matter, the get-togethers had a zombie-like feel to them. My outwardly indifferent peers were always somewhere else. Come to think of it, there were more than few classes like that.

However, I do not remember any of my glassy-eyed peers being “triggered” by something said during the history lectures. And speaking for myself only, I never felt “unsafe.” The school had a Campus Ministry, which served, I suppose, as a 1980s version of a “safe space”—safe space lite. In my four years of higher education, I never dropped by.

I am glad that I grew up in a time without the Internet, social media, and smartphones. Men and women are now losing their jobs and having their reputations ruined because of something somebody unearthed in their all-encompassing virtual trail. It is pathetic and scary at the same time. People are wielding power with these big reveals. Small people. God forbid you tweeted something five years ago, sent a private e-mail, or liked a Facebook post that offends someone who could do you harm. You could be toast in a New York minute. Guess what? Nobody is perfect and everybody is a hypocrite at one time or another. It is human nature. And now for some further questions, comments, and observations…

What is it with McDonald's now-you-see-it, now-you-don't McRib sandwiches? Perhaps the chain appreciates that we always need something to look forward to in life.

Believe or not, there are even reports of employee shortages in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). This would have been unheard of several years ago when waiting lists were the rule.

Canada geese heading from a blue state to a red state for the winter?

I saw this on a subway car floor last week. A "punk" is what we called them in my youth. We bought them in local candy stores.

May I say right now that it is not your grandfather's subway car advertising anymore...

Definitely not!

In this age of branding, subway car advertising often features one or two products or services in the entire car. This uplifting product ads covered half the car.

In these tough times for the hospitality industry, I hope this restaurant has found someone to man its phone, a trying, stress-filled position no doubt.

Recently, I read this lengthy article featuring former restaurant employees explaining why they left the industry. One recurring theme was how poorly they were treated by the customers. The consensus was that things got increasingly ugly as the pandemic took hold. This does not speak well for the public at large. Seems to me that these folks deserved a better fate.

I have eaten inside multiple pizzerias in New York City this past month. Only one time was I asked to show my vaccination card.

There are outstanding pizza places in the city, but most of them are mediocre at best. This slice fits the bill, but because it was fresh out of the oven it was not half-bad.

Par for the course near Penn Station. But for tired and hungry tourists...who knows?

It could be a slice to remember.

Every now and then I encounter something on the sidewalk with a story to tell. Seems that whoever purchased, or stole, these Memory Foam Boot Slippers could not wait to put them on and discard her old footwear. Right then and there!

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is now arguing that the First Amendment's free speech clause has been interpreted "too broadly" by courts. It is not your grandfather's ACLU anymore, an organization I once had the utmost regard for. 

Atlas is more than shrugging at that news. He is also unmasked as Rockefeller Center readies for the holiday season.

I know that New York City's considerable rat population suffered during the worst of the pandemic. How did the local seagulls fare?

In my last visit to a favorite diner, I noticed that the coffee mugs were smaller. It is the sign of the times. Inflation, shortages, and general nuttiness. Regardless of the size of the coffee cup, I say, "God bless the servers."

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro.)

The Scent of a Postman

(Originally published 3-14-14)

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Nigro family's local mail carrier was a fellow named Louie. Never without a cigar in his mouth as he made his appointed rounds, he was a memorable postman from a bygone era. His cigar was his calling card and how we—fortunate enough to be among his route—knew that the day’s mail had arrived.

In fact, our front door was typically unlocked during the waking hours, and Louie would enter the hallway leading to the upstairs apartment and place the mail on the bottom step. In his wake there was always that distinctive cigar bouquet. Occasionally, he would ask to use the toilet. Our family dog, Ginger, did not care much for company of any kind, especially mailmen, but Louie’s fearlessness won the day. As he delivered the mail, he could regularly be heard exclaiming, “Shut up!” to the loudly barking Ginger. Eventually, Ginger accepted Louie’s familiar cigar wafts and cries of “Shut up!” as par for the course. Louie the mailman was not an unwelcome intruder after all and received a tepid wag of the tail from her as he made his presence known.

Recently, I thought about Louie and our past open-door policy. The late 1970s were a high crime time in New York City, my Bronx neighborhood included. Yet, vestiges of the mentality from a more neighborly past endured. As a little kid, I do not ever remember using a key, because the door was always open. Neither Louie nor I needed one.

Back in the Louie the Mailman era, nobody could ever have envisioned the post office would one day be on the rocks. It seemed that post offices and mail carriers were eternal, and that generation after generation would covet taking the post office test for a job with security and good benefits. It is where my father plied his trade for a quarter of a century. But this tax season revealed once more why Louie and his vaunted employer face uncertain times. While I still mail tax returns to the IRS, I did not get the tax package in the mail, which once upon a time was the norm for everybody. Courtesy of technology, there is so much lost postal business in too many places to count. I fear the scent of a cigar-chomping postman may one day be only a smell memory. Fortunately, Louie retired to Florida in the early 1980s when the going was still good. I am sure he is delivering mail now—with his old aplomb and cigar in hand—somewhere beyond the Pearly Gates.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Lots for Less

(Originally published 12/29/17)

On January 1, 1971, New York City—as measured in Central Park—received over six inches of snow. Thanks to the wealth of information on the Internet, I was able to confirm my memory of that very snowfall. There was enough of the white stuff for my best friend and I to build a snowman in what we in the neighborhood affectionately called “the lot.” We got out the sled, too, and descended a hill into what was a filled-in portion of the once visible and meandering Tibbetts Brook. That swampy snapshot was before my time, but at least I got to experience the lot.

In the early 1970s, there were still a smattering of empty lots in the Bronx and the other boroughs of New York City. However, their days were numbered. Most of the remaining lots would be built upon—and sooner rather than later. In the name of progress, the lot and an adjoining victory garden were plowed under and fenced in several months after our snowman-building adventure. That snowman was therefore history in the making. For never again would a Frosty rise on that hallowed ground, which in time would be a parking garage for a six-story building.

The snowman-building story would not be complete without mentioning the neighborhood tough who materialized and assisted us with our task. My friend and I were on tenterhooks in the company of this uninvited visitor. With good reason, we feared he might cause trouble and—very possibly—knock down our snowman. But life is full of surprises. Without an entourage to encourage destruction and mayhem, the punk from the next block pitched in and the fledgling moments of New Year 1971 were peachy-keen.

Forty-seven years have since passed. My then best friend is not my friend anymore. No acrimonious breakup to report. Childhood friends are just not always keepers. The passage of time sees to that. Recently, I have seen the bully boy as an adult, and we said hello to one another. I really should have thanked him for not knocking down the snowman. I do not see him on Facebook but see plenty of his peers from the past. In their adult incarnations, a fair share of them relish recounting blasts from the past, like knocking down someone else’s snowman.

A year ago—on New Year’s Day 2017—I visited Manhattan in the early morning and waded through the remains of the previous night’s New Year’s Eve celebration. There were concrete barriers everywhere and the area mailboxes were all padlocked. It is not only going to be frigid when the ball drops at Times Square a couple of nights from now, but security will be even tighter than last year. I read where two million people are going to be in attendance. Being there on the last night of the year has never been on my to-do list. It is not on my bucket list, either.

On January 1, 2017, I spied a sign in a shuttered Manhattan eatery window. It read: “We are closed for Happy New Year.” The Wishful Thinking Department, I daresay. In the waning days and hours of 2017, I cannot help but note the movie in the theaters about Winston Churchill called Darkest Hour. Mike Huckabee recently compared Donald Trump to Churchill. And Senator Orrin Hatch thinks the Trump presidency may be the “greatest ever.” Churchill, Washington, and Lincoln—to name just a few—are no doubt rolling over in their graves. When I was eight years old and building that snowman at the start of a new year, it was a simpler time—for me at least. It was not so simple for those fighting in Vietnam or those receiving draft notices in the mail. Darkest hours are in the eyes of the beholder, I guess. So, what will 2018 bring? A Happy New Year? I cannot say. I can say there will not be any snowman building in the lot.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Endings and Beginnings

(Originally published 12/31/18)

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. As I type these words, the year 2019 is several hours away. And it is 2019 in some places already! Time. Today, for some reason, I thought of this psychotic local businessman, whom I regularly patronized, saying to me on the eve of the new millennium: “Remember when we were kids and would calculate how old we would be in the year 2000?” Indeed, 2000 then seemed more the stuff of science fiction than an eventual reality. As I traversed the ever-changing metropolis that I call home yesterday, the passage of time was—not surprisingly—foremost on my mind...

All roads may lead home...but tracks?

Mr. Lundberg is going to be in for a big surprise the next time he rides the subway. I hope he is wearing a mask when he does. And he just might want to designate a new favorite daughter in the New Year.

A dearly departed older friend of mine used to mimic a youthful crony of his who salivated at the prospect of a night out. "Tonight, we drink!" he would exclaim with anticipatory glee. Stay inside tonight.

It is not your grandfather's pizza parlor anymore...

As a youth in the oh-so-colorful 1970s, I helped a neighbor brainstorm a name for a potential restaurant business that sold salads and only salads—a trailblazing idea at the time. The consensus choice was “Salad King,” with the runner-up “Land of a Thousand Salads.” I would really like to know what the runner-up was here…

When in Rome...or in this instance hipster New York City...

The vanishing old of old New York...

How long can this building survive? I wonder...

t is destined to be shuttered up—just like its neighbor to the south, I fear—and then demolished.

And there used to be a deli where the sandwiches were large and tasty...Now the children try to find it…and they can't believe their eyes…Yes, there used to be a deli—the A & A—right here.

Gentrification...

Even dog breeds are getting hipper...

Looking at least to break this glass ceiling in 2019...

"H" marks the spot...

Take the road less traveled, I say...

Baby, it's cold outside...

When you come to a fork in the road, take it...

Be it ever so crumble, there is no place like home...in 2018 and 2019.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

The Odd Couple: 2020, 1975

(Originally published 11/13/20)

While living in a fast-paced technological age has its pitfalls, it also has its benefits. Information, for one, is at our fingertips. It is a moment, for instance, when people can broadcast the most trivial bits of nostalgia and strike a resounding chord with those of us who remember a slower paced, less technological time. A time when Los Angeles PI Jim Rockford had a rare telephone answering machine at home and, while on the road, pulled over to street pay phones to retrieve his messages.

Today is November 13—Friday the 13th if you are keeping score—the day that “Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence.” And in case you have forgotten: “That request came from his wife.” Although it never did especially well in the ratings, The Odd Couple, starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, was nonetheless a classic 1970s television series that lasted five seasons. The show’s humor holds up well. Yet, it rarely appeared or appears in syndication. The opening theme and montage of the lead characters, Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, out and about on the streets of the Big Apple gave the show a real New York feel, despite it being filmed before a live audience on a Hollywood sound stage.

When The Odd Couple ran in prime time, New York City was a gritty metropolis slipping and sliding towards insolvency. Crime was up and services, like sanitation, down and it certainly showed. I have heard some contemporary talking heads compare the goings-on of the 1970s with the city’s current decline. Short and hapless Abe Beame was the mayor when the excrement finally hit the fan in 1975, the year the last episode of The Odd Couple aired. Tall and hapless Bill de Blasio is the mayor when the most recent excrement hit the fan—and it is splattering all over us as I speak. But there the similarities end.

There is a great photo site on Facebook called “Dirty Old 1970's New York City.” It is a pictorial tribute to the New York of the 1970s and, too, the early-1980s, which—you guessed were dirtier in look and feel than what came before and what came after. A friend of mine remembers his father’s reaction to what New York City had become in the 1970s. Born in 1915 Manhattan, this man moved north to the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx in the 1940s, which was then positively quaint—an urban enclave with empty lots and a distinctive small town feel. New York City subways were clean and efficient back then. By the 1970s, the very same subways were prone to breakdowns and covered in unsightly graffiti. So, understandably for a man of his generation, he felt palpable despair. The city he lived in for his entire life had morphed into a veritable sewer on life support.

I, on the other hand, was a teenager in the 1970s. I noticed the graffiti on the subways and everywhere else. I noticed the parks were rundown, filthy, and not being maintained. There were a lot of muggings and break-ins in the neighborhood, too. But I found it a wonderful time to be a kid growing up in New York. When many of us look at pictures of Dirty Old New York City, we remember when—when, for one, The Odd Couple was on the air and Shea Stadium stood proudly in the flight path of LaGuardia Airport. I recall an episode when Felix and Oscar’s apartment was burglarized. It was the 1970s, after all, and that was a fitting plotline for a sitcom fictionally situated in New York City. Food for thought: Murray the cop was on the same police force as Theo Kojak, while Jim Rockford independently plied his trade three thousand miles away.

Let us queue up the opening themes now: The Odd Couple, Kojak, and The Rockford Files. Listen, this is precisely why there is no comparing 2020 New York City to its 1970s predecessor—or Los Angeles in Jim Rockford’s case. Dirty Old New York City unofficially marked the beginning of the end of old New York. It was often coarse, sometimes scary, but very, very colorful. Look at all those mom-and-pop stores, luncheonettes serving up egg creams, and neighborhood bars with Schaefer Beer neon signs in the window. “But he also knew that someday he would return to her”—and he did. Happy November 13!

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

 

Christmas, Ronco, and Me

(Originally published on 12/11/11)

Visualize this: a diverse assortment of Ronco merchandise adorning endcaps at all Woolworth-Woolco stores, Osco drugs, and other fine retailers. Add to this snapshot from the past, Ronco television commercials running 24/7 in the weeks leading up to Christmas, featuring everything from Mr. Microphone to the Egg Scrambler to the Smokeless Ashtray. I would be hard-pressed to conjure up another company in all human history that had something for everyone on Christmas lists. Ronco rocked.

Fast forward more than three decades and Ronco, sadly, is in the ash heap of entrepreneurial history, as are many of the exclusive stores that sold its merchandise. And so, we are left with only fond Ronco-inspired Christmas memories. I purchased a few Ronco products in my day, but one stands out—the Bottle and Jar Cutter. For some reason, I became fixated on the idea of getting this thing for my father and introducing him to a brand new and exciting hobby. He had been heavily into decoupage in the early 1970s and a prolific plaque maker. Many of his creations, in fact, endure in people’s homes to this day. But by the late 1970s, this one-time hobby of his had run its course, and I reasoned he needed another creative venue to occupy his spare time. I honestly thought he might get into bottle and jar cutting. I imagined him turning all kinds of empty glass bottles and jars into candy dishes, decorative bowls, and terrariums. So many things came in glass bottles and jars back then—everything from sodas to cooking oils to peanut butters—and, too, there was no such thing as recycling. So, I thought turning a lot of empty bottles and jars into something cool and special made perfect sense.

To make a long story short, the Ronco Bottle and Jar Cutter was a monumental bust as a Christmas gift. For some reason, it was met with outright hostility. And there is a lesson here concerning the art of gift giving, wasting money, and all of that. But my biggest regret regarding the Ronco Bottle and Jar Cutter is that I did not just take it back and hold on to it in its original box. At least then I could have it on display on my end table now, or possibly even have sold it on eBay ten years ago for a tidy profit. But then again, I was an idealistic youth who merely wanted my father to create a trailblazing line of late-1970s recession glass.

Movin' on Up or Down?

(Originally published 11/10/18)

This morning—a breezy and chilly one for this time of year—I was approached by a man with a business card in hand. Not a good start to the day! Foremost, this fellow wanted to know if I knew of anyone looking to buy or sell a home. I said that I did not. Not missing a beat, he then asked, "When are you thinking of moving?" This guy was making plenty of assumptions about me with that question, I thought, which he could not know, and crashing through my wall, too—and before the clock even struck ten! Despite it not being any of this real estate bloke's business, I paraphrased Mario Cuomo and said, "I have no plans on moving and no plans to make plans." Absolutely true in that exact snapshot in time. For the historical record, Cuomo uttered something similar—sans the moving part—when being badgered about whether he was going to run for president in 1988 and again in 1992. He was presidential timber du jour in those bygone days. And now for some further observations and recollections...

Oh, yes, the hawk has landed...in Van Cortlandt Park!

Pigeon, a Bronx delicacy, and an early Thanksgiving feast on the apropos barbecue grounds.

The "HUTE MASTE": Jack of all trades, master of none?

It was pouring rain this past Tuesday, Election Day, when I cast my ballot, which got a little wet in the process. Mine was not the only soggy vote. Courtesy of Mother Nature's deluge and our wet paper ballots, the various machines that scanned them ceased doing what they were supposed to be doing. Voters at my precinct, including me, had to slide our ballots into an "Emergency Ballot Box." There is a first time for everything.

When I ordered two scoops of chocolate ice cream at a local diner last night, I did not anticipate eating a pint's worth. For every action there is a reaction.

Many years ago, a friend of mine attended a free actor's workshop in Manhattan. The guest speaker was none other than Alec Baldwin. According to my pal, the man was quite gracious and patiently answered all questions posed. Of course, my friend had taken mass transit to the event that night and was not vying with Baldwin for a parking spot.

Wonder Woman's preferred clothier?

Speaking of superheroes, the Man of Steel must remember to take his garbage with him. This is not the 1970s!

Straight-line clouds, deep-blue skies, and the building where a man nicknamed "Q-ball" lives. Two out of three ain't bad.

It is one big hill and a park to boot: Ewen in the Bronx

The Purple Testament...but to what...in Ewen Park on the day after Halloween.

This Bud's for you...or the first can and bottle collector...who ascends or descends the formidable stairs of Ewen Park.

Johnny Carson: "They are so friendly!" Johnny Carson Audience: "How friendly are they?" Me: Not as friendly as you might think.

When Frosty the Snowman rides in a New York City subway car...

This is the end-result...

To get out those stubborn Escargots de Bourgogne stains, this is obviously the place for you...

This is not a homeless man. He is a wizened New Yorker who just put his smartphone in his pocket. You know...somebody once said, "Everything happens in threes." Chinese tradition holds that the number is a lucky one. In my religious upbringing, God was an amalgam of Three Persons—the Trinity—as if one were not enough. Come and knock on our door...

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)