So long to the summer....

"The voice of God" speaks

Wading through all the blather in the media today about the final home game at Yankee Stadium. One thing stands out, though: Bob Sheppard. The Post's Steve Serby did his Sunday Q-and-A with Sheppard, one of the city's most iconic and classy figures. He is the legendary voice of Yankee Stadium who started as public-address announcer in 1951. Unfortunately, an illness has kept the 97 year old (!) from the Stadium this season.

This passage really jumps out. Serby asks him his thoughts on various Yankees through the years.

Q: George Steinbrenner?

A: Do you know, after being there (more than) 50 years, I don't think we ever exchanged more than three or four lines over the time, and they were all cordial.

Wow. Well, given how shabbily Steinbrenner has treated his people, maybe this is a good thing...

Anyway, Sheppard ends on a hopeful note:

Q: The new Yankee Stadium?

A: Tell the people who read The Post I'm looking forward to next year.

He's too weak to attend tonight's last game. Still, as the Times noted in a profile of Sheppard yesterday:

Sheppard’s voice will be heard Sunday night, as it has been all season — as the recorded introduction for No. 2, the Yankee captain Derek Jeter, after Jeter requested this rare favor. The shortstop’s name — JEE-tah — has become a stylized flourish for Sheppard, who is otherwise a purist. Or maybe we all have exaggerated it, as we imitated it. At any rate, when they finally tear down the old place, that echo will bounce off the apartment buildings and bridges and hills of the Bronx and Manhattan — JEE-tah, JEE-tah, JEE-tah — forever.

Sheppard’s legacy is secure — half a century of Giants football games, including the classic 1958 championship loss to Baltimore, his voice and microphone ensconced in the Baseball Hall of Fame (even if the rules have not been bent to induct him along with hallowed broadcasters) and inclusion in a few movies and commercials over the years. (He does have a business side to him.)

Essentially, Sheppard is a simple man, as some poets and clerics and teachers can be termed simple. He never sought the company of the athletes. He had his own niche in life, and he still does, giving thanks that he can attend church each morning, go shopping, and in good weather walk the garden behind his home, always with Mary.

They are the most handsome couple in the world. I used to see them walking the shoreline at Jones Beach State Park in the summer of 1961, but what I did not know was that they were newlyweds. When I sat in their living room a few months ago, they told me how they met, at church, of course, after Sheppard’s first wife died of a brain tumor, leaving him with four children. He invited Mary Hoffman to the beach, where they swam and played pitch-and-putt golf, and, when he was ready, he proposed.

Bob has not resumed serving as a lector at Mass, but Mary reads from the scripture many mornings — “the best female lector I have ever heard,” he said Friday, as if he were saying “No. 2, Derek JEE-tah.”

The Sheppards resisted the Yankees’ kind offer of a limousine for Sunday night, but they do go out.

“You know how old I am?” Sheppard asked. “My daughter, Mary, is celebrating her 50th year in the convent. Can you imagine? And she is still young and beautiful.”

Sheppard in action from last season:

Some photos I took during the summer that don't really a thing to do with anything except that I took them this past summer, which ends today

Third Avenue and 11th Street, 7:50 a.m., Sept. 21

And now a word from our sponsor

In honor of the last game at Yankee Stadium. Or an excuse to run a silly commercial featuring Mickey Mantle.

And now, another word from our sponsor

Ditto.



Hmm, Dextrose food energy...

Breaking records; wasting gas

Hot off the wire! (And I'm assuming this is today...since it's hot off the wire and all...)

NY attempt at record for largest tow truck parade

NEW YORK (AP) -- Get ready for the rumble of 400 or more tow trucks parading through the streets of Queens and Brooklyn.

New York's towing industry plans to break the world record for the largest tow truck parade with a procession of 50-ton rotators, medium-duty trucks, flatbeds and wreckers.

The procession is slated to leave Shea Stadium and cruise along the Van Wyck Expressway before finishing at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The trucks will then park on the 5,000-foot runway to spell out the words "New York."

Guinness Book of World Records representatives will be on hand to certify the results of the parade. The previous world record was set on Aug. 20, 2004, at Wenatchee, Wash., by a parade of 83 tow trucks.

Hmm, given the price of gas these days....seems like money well spent. Good luck fellas! Anyway, this is all well and good, but does anyone remember what happened last time?

Down and out in NYC

Headline from today's Wall Street Journal:

As Times Turn Tough, New York's Wealthy Economize:
Plastic Surgeons, Jewelers, Yacht Builders Brace for Leaner Times; Saying No to Caviar

And the first few parargraphs:

A nose job in a hospital with a private nurse in attendance had been something of a rite of passage for Joan Asher's children. But when her fourth and last child was ready for her own rhinoplasty recently, Ms. Asher asked her to postpone it.
The financial markets were simply more out of whack than her 16-year-old's proboscis.
"The other noses were more prominent," the stay-at-home mother from a tony New York City suburb in Westchester County told her 16-year-old daughter. She could get hers done when things settled down.
The financial crisis on Wall Street has New York's well-to-do reeling.

No one attended the schmancy Sex and the City DVD release party

Horrors! Writes Sheila at Gawker: There's no satisfying way to explain the party, other than a PR clusterfuck/fuckup. However, maybe people are getting a little tired of the franchise after a six-year TV run, one of the most-hyped movies of the year, and a cultural reach that, on some days, seems to have infected the entire city with luxury brand names and bus tours. What does this say about the sequel? We're guessing nothing good. Sometimes you just have to get the shotgun and take the old mare out behind the barn.

Saturday morning bonus!

Here's a feature on the Sex and the City Tour from April 2004 by Norwegian journalist Henrik Pryser Libell:

Dee Dee Ramone and Spikey Tops on the Uncle Floyd Show

From April 1991.



Who's Uncle Floyd?

Lucky Cheng's leaving the East Village for the wilds of Times Square

News from GNML via Eater.

As Down by the Hipster notes: "We are also happy that it will be bringing its legions of tourists and bachelorette parties with them. Walking past the restaurant on a weekend night is like walking through a gauntlet of cheese. You know what we mean. You know."

Thanks for the memories!

EV Grieve Etc.

A few things...

Avalon to buy Extra Place from City? (Save the Lower East Side!)

The growing number of tent cities (CNN)

Ken remembers HoJo's (Greenwich Village Daily Photo via Jeremiah)

An evening to save the Bowery (Bowery Boogie)

SJP on the possible Sex and the City sequel (Us -- no giggling, please)

Oh, to be rich and white...to have the ways and means to help out other rich white people (esquared)

[Photo via Forgotten New York]

In which EV Grieve panics for a brief moment

Was startled the other day when I saw the ominous-from-a-distance sign hanging above Life at 1oth Street and Avenue.

Just an "apartment for rent" sign. Uh. Carry on. Nothing to see here...

Anyway, forgive me for being a little jumpy. Last time I made note of a building for sale, the business on the ground floor moved...in this case, Vasmay Lounge at 269 E. Houston St.

Previously on EV Grieve:

Rent lives; Life lives on

Did the Donut Social cause a headache for HOWL?

Scoopy's Notebook in The Villager this week has more on the fallout from the Donut Social on Sept. 5:

The L.E.S. Slacktivists’ sound-permit flap spilled over to the recent HOWL! Festival, causing some howls of frustration from festival organizers. After John Penley, Jerry “The Peddler” Wade and Bill Cashman, Leftover Crack’s manager, argued in federal court that the local crust-core band’s planned concert outside the Ninth Police Precinct on Sept. 5 was being held to unfairly low decibel levels, police apparently felt they had to make a better show of monitoring HOWL! sound levels. Artist James Romberger, whose wife, Marguerite Van Cook, ran this year’s festival, as she did last year, said that “The Death to the Police Rally,” as he called it, caused a headache for HOWL! “We were enforced,” Romberger said. “They stood there all day with whatever those were…sound guns, or whatever.” Actually, Romberger said he’s more concerned about the whole “death” trend of late by local singer/activists, from Leftover Crack’s Sturgeon singing “Kill cops” to David Peel leading choruses of “Die yuppie scum!” “Anyone who’s against the death penalty cannot be behind calling for death,” Romberger stated. “Throwing donuts and pies is O.K., funny, ha ha. But calling for death is anti-reasonable and uncivilized.” Speaking of throwing donuts, we hear that the harassment charge against Sturgeon for trying to pelt police with the pastries on Sept. 5 was dropped but that he was asked to perform 200 hours of community service, which he refused.

Previously Donut Social coverage on EV Grieve.

The oldest tattoo shop in Manhattan

City Snapshots had a nice post this week on Mike Bakaty, proprietor of the only tattoo parlor left from the days when tattooing was illegal in New York. His shop, Fineline Tattoo, is on First Avenue between First and Second Street in the East Village.

As CS notes:

Mike Bakaty draws tattoos with a signed picture of Gandhi hanging in a frame over his shoulder: “To Mike. Your man, Mahatma.” He traveled a lot as a young sailor, and the navy is where he got a taste for tattooing. Then, during what Bakaty refers to as the bootleg years – the period in which tattooing was illegal in New York – he started practicing the art behind closed doors on the Lower East Side.

Among the people who have received a tattoo from Bakaty: Wilford Brimley.

Via a link at City Snapshots, here's a brief look at the history of tattooing in NYC:

For 36 years, there were no tattoo shop storefronts in New York City - not even on the Bowery, where modern tattooing was invented in the 1890s. There were no televisions in street-level store windows showing people getting tattoos, no advertising - save for the tattoos themselves - fliers or vague messages in the back of the Village Voice. Every Tom had to know Dick who knew Harry who knew where to get a tattoo.

Tattooing in New York City went underground after the City Health Department found what it said were a series of blood-borne hepatitis cases coming from tattoo parlors in 1961. Tattoos were done on the second story of buildings on Canal Street, in basements, apartments and backrooms.

Noted

The city’s unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent from 5 percent in July — the largest monthly increase in more than 30 years — as about 5,200 private-sector jobs were eliminated . . . Many of the layoffs came in the tumbling financial sector, which is one of the city’s biggest employers and the provider of nearly one-fourth of its annual wages and salaries. (New York Times)

What a Steel!

Ads have gone up around the East Village, like the one below seen at 8th Street and Avenue C, for The SteelWorks Lofts coming soon to Williamsburg. The sales gallery is opening in October for the lofts that are priced from $495,000 to $1.5 million.


Seems perfect for the East Village resident who's sick and tired of the overdevelopment and condofication of this neighborhood...to move to a neighborhood with even more ridciulous overdevelopment and condofication.

P.S.
What exactly is "handcrafted living"? And what's up with the blowtorch? Why is Jennifer Beals coming to mind?

"Its quirky feel has come to symbolize the avant-garde, rebellious East Village spirit"

The Daily News takes a look at Red Square on East Houston:

Conceived by self-proclaimed radical sociologist-turned-real-estate-developer [Michael] Rosen in 1989, Red Square occupies land that served as an automobile service station for more than 25 years. Rosen's wife's family bought the property in the 1960s, and, he points out, no homes were destroyed and no businesses were displaced.Red Square was designed by graphic artist legend Tibor Kalman, a Hungarian immigrant. Its quirky feel has come to symbolize the avant-garde, rebellious East Village spirit.

Hmmm.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Looking back: Red Square and gentrification

Otis Williams Jr. on Wall Street

Otis Williams Jr. -- street performer, sculptor, poet and self-proclaimed health fanatic and ex-con -- took to the steps at Federal Hall on Wall Street after work Tuesday to talk about being clean and sober and, uh, some other things that I couldn't quite make out. The tourists seemed entertained. And the Federal Hall officer was jovial enough in ushering Otis off the stairs (in the second video).

Story of a City: New York (1946)

Here's a revved-up version via Rocketboom:


[Via AnimalNewYork]