Yup, The Lights Went Out

Is there a Staten Island angle on the 1977 blackouts? Don’t worry, the Advance has it covered:

On the night of July 13, 1977, drivers crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Staten Island were confronted by a truly unsettling sight: The borough, all 58.5 square miles of it, was shrouded in black.

It has been nearly 30 years since the “Blackout of ’77” plunged New York City into darkness for nearly two days, including a frenzy of looting and lawlessness, particularly in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

Many Staten Islanders can still vividly recall “the day the lights went out.”

“Our area went black, and everybody was out in the street walking around. It wasn’t really until the next day that we knew what happened,” said Marjorie Decker Johnson of Clifton, a local historian and preservationist.

. . .

James McBratney, owner of Jimmy Max restaurant in Westerleigh, remembers taking advantage of the situation and having a little fun while the lights were off.

“I was 16 years old, working at Denino’s (the Port Richmond pizzeria) making pies. When the lights went out we had no customers and no air conditioning. I went to the back room with my friend John and we split a six-pack. Somehow, we thought we were helping the situation by drinking whatever beer there was before it got too warm,” said McBratney.

OK, so in lieu of exciting Staten Island blackout stories, revert to Staten Islanders’ blackout stories:

Danny Blaine, owner of the eponymous saloon in Fort Wadsworth, was working with Ladder Co. 122 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Staten Island should count itself lucky, he said, considering the hellish conditions that obtained in the “borough of homes and churches.”

“It was like being in a war zone,” said Blaine, a Livingston resident. “We were out all night on calls. There was one call where we passed six fully involved, three-story roaring fires just to get to our building.”

Bob FitzSimmons of St. George was working as a stationary engineer at Manhattan’s Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. He described scenes that resembled the post-apocalyptic landscape of John Carpenter’s 1996 action flick “Escape From L.A.”

“We had a large diesel engine to supply lights and power. It was chaotic because everything was dark except for us. We were like a lighthouse. The whole neighborhood congregated outside the hospital and our security was overtaxed with people trying to escape the dark,” said FitzSimmons.

“We had a lot of surgeries because there were a lot of bullets flying around that night. There were people chasing each other with shotguns. I couldn’t believe the devastation around me,” he continued.

When asked how he remembered Staten Island during the blackout he replied: “It wasn’t that bad. We got lucky.”

Daniel Doctoroff Squirms

To some, “master builder” remains as dirty sounding as ever:

The question trails Robert Caro like a fly, buzzing in his ear. Over and over, at cocktail parties and museum receptions in the past few years, he hears variations on the same query.

“Doesn’t New York need a new master builder?” people ask. “Don’t we need a new Robert Moses?”

Mr. Caro, 71, sits in his spare writer’s aerie high in a Midtown office building, an owlish man with a faint smile. His answer has the virtue of concision:

No.

Maybe we really need to be wondering if New York just needs a new Robert Caro.

It’s Probably Best To Keep Denis Hamill Way Far Away From Forest Hills*

On Being Denis Hamill: 1) pick the low-hanging fruit; 2) cause a big stir with that fruit; 3) bask in the smug self-righteousness said fruit bears:

The best part about the Corbin Place uproar is that there is uproar.

On the evening of Feb. 26, I sat in the last row of an assembly room in Kingsborough Community College where Community Board 15 held a public hearing about changing the street name of Corbin Place. About 100 people showed up from the snowy streets, more than most City Council meetings.

It was democracy at its best.

. . .

In the middle of the meeting Leonard Benardo — who with his wife, Jennifer Weiss, wrote “Brooklyn by Name,” which gives the history of most street names in Brooklyn — asked me, “What are we gonna do, rename the 70 streets in Brooklyn named after slaveholders?”

“Why not,” I asked.

I said that because of his book, which inspired my column, a whole neighborhood was discussing and debating local history. And how could that ever be a bad thing? If Nostrand Ave., Vanderbilt Ave., and Lott St. are named for slaveholders, shouldn’t the citizens who live on those streets or in their surrounding neighborhoods have a chance to debate whether that’s a proper name to honor on a street sign?

If history is revised, shouldn’t street signs also be revised? Even if people have to be mildly inconvenienced by having their addresses altered on house deeds, driver’s licenses, and stationery?

Why not turn all the soil in a new century and see what we find?

*Because you thought Austin Street was named for Stephen F.? Guess again!

Landmarks Body Considers Topless Bar

And does this also mean that from here on out the landmarked building would always have to be used in a “similar function”? The Landmarks Preservation Commission considers the case of a topless bar:

Robert Kremer, who holds the lease on the Pussycat Lounge, spoke in favor of landmark designation of one of Manhattan’s oldest houses at a public hearing yesterday at the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Preservationists say 96 Greenwich Street House, along with the adjacent 94 and 94 1/2 Greenwich St. buildings, are rare examples of a row of Federal-style houses, offering a glimpse of early New York. The area south of ground zero has suffered from being blocked off from the rest of the city by the 16-acre void left at the site of the former World Trade Center. Recently, developer Joseph Moinian has begun work on a 53-story hotel and condominium nearby. Much of the financial district has seen conversion to residential from office space in the past few years as the nature of downtown has changed toward a more full-time environment.

The Pussycat Lounge, long a neighborhood watering hole for Wall Street brokers and civil servants, sits on an eclectic block that also has a boxing gym and delis. A long bar runs most of the length of the Pussycat Lounge, behind which is a stage where scantily clad women perform. A small knight and a cat are design props upon the stage. The second floor is a rock ‘n’ roll club.

The executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Andrew Berman, said these structures, built when John Adams was president, were among the few surviving relics of the first era of development in New York.

Sculptor + Sitting Around Watching Too Much Daytime Television = Bad Ahistorical Art

Mr. Miller, put down the remote . . . and for pete’s sake, stay away from the Oprah books:

At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.

Beneath an eight-foot-tall sculpture of Douglass, the plans call for a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this.

The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code — the subject of a popular book that has been featured on no less a cultural touchstone than “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — never existed. And now the city is reconsidering the inclusion of the plaques, so as not to “publicize spurious history,” Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said yesterday.

. . .

Algernon Miller, who designed the memorial site, said he “was inspired by this story line,” which he discovered in the library. His was a re-interpretation, he said, noting that he was “taking a soft material, a quilt, and converting it into granite.”

“Traditionally what African-Americans do is take something and reinterpret into another form,” he said.

. . .

Giles R. Wright, director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission, rattled off the historians’ problems in a telephone interview: There is no surviving example of an encoded quilt from the period. The code was never mentioned in any of the interviews of ex-slaves carried out in the 1930’s by the Works Progress Administration. There is no mention of quilting codes in any diaries or memoirs from the period.

Mr. Miller responded to critics: “No matter what anyone has to say, they weren’t there in that particular moment, especially something that was in secret.”