Not Soon Enough!

The phrase “too soon” begins its third life as irrelevant pop culture reference:

Again it comes, for the sixth time now — 2,191 days after that awful morning — falling for the first time on a Tuesday, the same day of the week.

Again there will be the public tributes, the tightly scripted memorial events, the reflex news coverage, the souvenir peddlers.

Is all of it necessary, at the same decibel level — still?

Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened. It began before the first anniversary of the terrorist attack. By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying.

“I may sound callous, but doesn’t grieving have a shelf life?” said Charlene Correia, 57, a nursing supervisor from Acushnet, Mass. “We’re very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let’s wind it down.”

. . .

David Hendrickson, 56, a computer software trainer who lives in Manhattan, said he began being somewhat irritated by the attention to the commemoration on the third anniversary. “It seems a little much to me to still be talking about this six years later,” he said. “I understand it’s a sad thing. I understand it’s a tragedy. I’ve had my own share of tragedies — my uncle was killed in a tornado. But you get on. I have the sense that some people are living on their victimhood, which I find a little tiring.”

On a different note, here’s one of the more interesting ways everything changed on 9/11:

Where you were, your proximity to the attack — these things shade your tie to the anniversary. On Sept. 11, Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, was crossing Washington Square in Greenwich Village and was approached by a panhandler, whom he brushed off. The panhandler then said, “The World Trade Center is on fire.”

Dr. Zimmerman didn’t even look. Not until he got to his office did he find out it was truth. “I now pay more attention to what homeless people say,” he said.

Would You Kiss This Man?

If this were today, we’d have a YouTube video to confirm:

Edith Shain, long thought to be the woman in the famous V-J day photograph of a nurse and a sailor kissing to celebrate the end of World War II, reasserted Tuesday that it was in fact her in the picture.

Monday, Glenn McDuffie, an 80-year-old Houston retiree, cast doubts on the true identity of the woman, telling amNewYork, “I know the woman I kissed, and she ain’t it.”

Nonsense, she insisted. “This latest man, no way. I ask all of the men who claim it was them what was going on around us, what they said to me, and this one didn’t know.”

. . .

Reached Tuesday at her home in Santa Monica, Shain said she doubted McDuffie’s claim that he’s the sailor.

“There is no way of knowing who it actually was,” she said. “A lot of men over the years have claimed to be the sailor and there is now way to negate them — I bet they all kissed a lot of women that day.”

Whoever locked lips that day was no matter to the estimated 300 people who showed up at Times Square yesterday to re-enact the iconic photograph. Veterans from World War II and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were on hand along with couples from around the country for the annual Times Square Kiss-In.

“I was here when it happened,” said Abner Greenberg, 83, of Manhattan, who remembered kissing more girls that day 62 years ago than he ever had in his life. “People were hugging each other, men, women, it didn’t matter. I’d never seen anything like it.”

An estimated 2 million people, said to be the largest crowd ever assembled in human history, rushed to the square to celebrate the end of the war.

No wonder Shain denies it — the sailor sounds like a cad:

McDuffie, 80, of Houston, was identified last week by a forensic artist as the man in the famous Life Magazine photo — taken 62 years ago Tuesday — of a soldier and a nurse smooching in Times Square to celebrate victory over Japan in World War II.

McDuffie says he wants nothing to do with the annual “Kiss-In” celebration Tuesday or with Edith Shain, 87, who has long been believed to be the woman in the photo, until she submits to the battery of polygraph tests that he has undergone over the years to prove his identity.

. . .

In fact, McDuffie said he had tried to reach out to Shain through the years, but that she was far less receptive than she may have been on Broadway that day.

“She’s been a smart ass about it all the time so I hung up on her,” he said.

. . .

McDuffie said he was in the city that day to see his girlfriend, Ardith Bloomfield, who lived in Brooklyn, when word came that the war was over.

“I went over there and kissed her and saw a man running at us,” McDuffie recalled. “I thought it was a jealous husband or boyfriend coming to poke me in the eyes. I looked up and saw he was taking the picture and I kissed her as long as it took for him to take it.”

When That Engine Roars, It Enters My Blood Like A Fever

As the last of the Four Hundred passes on, a new dynasty emerges:

For almost nine hours on Sunday, Eliot Spitzer, the Upper East Sider with the Princeton and Harvard education and the reputation for a hyperkinetic braininess, indulged his other side. Nascar, possibly the vehicle for the nation’s most overt display of country fried machismo, has recently become a calculated interest for ambitious politicians trying to appeal to a working-class male demographic.

Mr. Spitzer, however, can lay a legitimate claim to fandom, and appears to relish the sport as fervently as he does the Yankees.

And A Little Later On Maybe We Can Grab Some Breakfast At Tiffany’s?

I know it’s a good deal, but you never want to get to the point where you become “that guy”:

For twenty-two years, the photographer Josef Astor (no relation) has had a studio above the stage at Carnegie Hall. It’s on the eighth floor, although technically the eighth is below the seventh; to get to it you take an elevator to six and walk up half a flight of stairs. The Carnegie Hall Studio Towers, as these quarters over the concert hall are known, contain many such oddities, but they also harbor one Manhattan commonplace: a band of artist-occupants whose tenancy is venerable, tenuous, and probably doomed.

Astor is one of the leaders of the tenants’ association, which is fighting the landlord, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, which wants them all out. It intends to gut the building and make space for its own offices and programs. It has recently commenced eviction proceedings. The fifty or so artists who occupy the studios — most of them have been here for decades — contend that a provision in the lease between the corporation and the city, which owns the property, guarantees their right to stay.

Astor’s studio, with creaky wood floors, faces north; the indirect light, from a giant skylight, twenty feet overhead, is ideal for photography and painting. There is a balcony, with room for a bed, and a kitchenette. Last Wednesday, he’d arranged a dozen chairs—no one like the other — in a circle, in anticipation of a meeting, that evening, between some tenants, their lawyer (a woman named Ms. Boop), and local politicians, whose vaguely articulated sympathies they hoped to convert into tactical support. A Senegal parrot named Zoltan flew freely about the place. Astor ticked off the names of some of the studios’ former residents (Isadora Duncan, Agnes de Mille, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Norman Mailer) and current ones (such as the ninety-five-year-old photographer Editta Sherman, known as the Duchess of Carnegie Hall, and the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, seen occasionally in the hall on his way to the showers) and evoked the days when the corridors were filled with the sounds of piano and clarinet.

. . .

Astor led the way up some stairs to the fourteenth floor, then across the building and down some more stairs to the eleventh, to a studio occupied by the writer and radio host Jonathan Schwartz, who was eating an avocado, under a framed print that read “AVOCADO.” He’d been in the space since 1970, having inherited it from his father, the composer Arthur Schwartz. “I represent Carnegie Hall when I’m out in the world,” he said. “I hope that’s not presumptuous.”

He lives here with his cat, Nelson (named after Nelson Riddle), and occasionally with his wife, whom he married in the building in 1984. The wedding was in Studio 906, which had belonged to Joe Raposo, who wrote music for “Sesame Street.” Wilfrid Sheed and Jerzy Kosinski had been there. “The party spilled out onto the landing,” he said. “We had a big glass bowl of caviar.”

The studio, full of books, CDs, and not much else, gave rise to that old misguided desire for a prison sentence that would afford a man the time to catch up on his reading. “That’s one of the points here,” Schwartz said. “There are dozens of studios like this in the building that have, if not this essence, then another like it. It’s not a conceit — it’s a feeling. To dislodge us is insulting.”

(Exit question: should a rent-control parasite admit that he’s also a “die hard Red Sox fan”? We’re coming for that songbook, Schwartz!)

The Coney Island Monorail!

Now that plans for Coney Island’s rejuvenation seem to be moving forward, the streetcar wing of the Lionel-Industrial Complex is trying to get its filthy paws on Coney Island, too:

The Brooklyn City Streetcar Company imagines trolleys rumbling through the seaside streets once more, hearkening to the heyday of an amusement district now set to undergo an over $1 billion redevelopment.

The not-for-profit group has been discussing its proposal with city officials, including the Coney Island Development Corporation, a quasi-public agency working on the area’s rezoning plan.

The group proposes the trolley line to run from Dreier-Offerman Park to the West 8th Street subway station, then to Surf Avenue to Keyspan Park, with an eventual extension to the edge of Sea Gate.

Another route could run from Dreier-Offerman to Cropsey Avenue, then to Neptune Avenue, then south to Stillwell Avenue.

Then they take a page from Mayor Nasonex (since he always sounds so congested) by arguing that it will reduce traffic (and asthma rates?) in the busy corridor between Dreier-Offerman Park and the projects across the street from the baseball field where the Cyclones play:

Aside from adding to the ambiance of the amusement area, trolleys would help reduce area traffic, [Brooklyn City Streetcar Company founder and president Arthur] Melnick said.

Trolleys, which run on electricity, are also environmentally friendly. “They are the greenest form of motorized transportation,” he said.

Chuck Reichenthal, a member of the Coney Island Development Corporation (CIDC) and the district manager of Community Board 13, said the plan merits further study, particularly as a way to “get cars off the street.”

“You could have them park farther away and then trolley people over to Coney Island,” Reichenthal said. “That would be an interesting concept.”

. . .

City Councilmember Domenic Recchia, who represents Coney Island, said he has spoken to Melnick and the plan sounds like “a great idea.”

“I think Coney Island will need some type of trolley service, whether it is his or another proposal,” the city lawmaker said.

“Everyone likes it. The question is, how can we make it happen?” Recchia said.

(Remember this: white elephant transportation projects are a sign of a sick city; maybe by the time it’s up and running Coney Island will be ready for its decline again.)