50th Street looking east from 9th Avenue

(date: not now)

There is a boarded up subway entrance to what once was New York's Madison Square Garden. It is just wood covering something that is not there, as if like a memory locked up, perhaps too dangerous to let loose.

Located at the end of an underused subway station, it is not much to look at, just some graffiti covered plywood on the wall. Without knowing what it is/once was, there is no significance to the thing. 50th street and 8th avenue is a slightly out-of-the-way part of town. Once though, thousands of people used that entrance to Madison Square Garden. Biblical multitudes went to the circus directly from the subway through that entrance. Others went to the fights, political conventions such as those for the America First movement( I wrote about thismovement in my book), the gatherings of tens of thousands of people for events of historic importance, remembered today still.

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For me it was the memory of a child, who, years later put together the pieces of the oddity of the location. The once massive stadium that was Madison Square Garden had become a parking lot occupying one complete city block. The vast emptiness was notable for its flatness and that flatness gave the area something rare downtown: an unobstructed view. Tenements that were usually jammed claustrophobically close could be seen at a distance on 50th street. Their dilapidation could be taken in at one glance instead of in pieces. Uniquely, the endless quality of the brownstoned buildings proved self-evident; they were there, one after the other, more alike than dissimilar. Once the neighborhoods of New York were full of these cheaply built apartments, housing for the immigrants that flooded the city at the beginning of the 20th century.

The vastness of the view was unusual enough for my teenage self to take note. Slumbering neurons awoke, recalling the magic shop once on that block. That shop captured my imagination as a much younger child. Something of direct relevance to me was once here and now it was gone.

New York is full of places like that magic shop. Places I'd been to then seen on TV shows. I'd walk in front of The Ed Sullivan theatre and remember something that never happened to me, such as the crowds of teenyboppers that would scream at the top of their lungs for a view of the mop-tops, The Beatles. There were other shows. One was THE NAKED CITY. I must have been six or seven when I saw that TV drama, but each episode left lasting impressions. Central Park lunches, scenes around town that I recognized and most especially an episode that I used as proof of answered prayer.

On that one episode police detectives search for a Bowery bum who is ill with some very contagious disease, idunno, TB or anthrax or somethin'. They search the places a Bowery bum would go, cheap bars, a place that bought old clothes, a hardware store where the sought-after bum bought turpentine (to drink). I recall an alley that may have been on Lafayette Street (just north of Houston St. or maybe it was the alley just east of Broadway on Canal). The TV detectives interrogated the owner of the business in that alley about the where this bum could be found. The rest of the story is uninteresting.

The business in the alley was to buy cardboard people from people who collected it from the streets. My little six-year old-mind was shocked. Somebody made a living from what I threw away. I prayed to God that I would not grow up to gather cardboard from the street to sell for money to buy turpentine to drink. My prayer has been answered and I have never, ever done this.

Skeptics used to point out that there is still time, I may yet re-cycle (new word) cardboard to get the money to buy turpentine to drink. I'd once shrug off those cynical skeptics. Now, as I tell this story again I note to myself that there is still time for me to explore this income stream, this special inebriation. In the Third World millions of destitute boys and girls do this. The few pennies the get enough to keep themselves alive one more day. No one is shocked.

THE NAKED CITY was in re-runs a few years back. Unfortunately for me it was on very, very late at night and I'd always fall asleep watching it. The last time I tuned in the show began with a whole series of shots in my old neighborhood. The first shot was the building I lived in.

In time I grew to embrace the idea of going through the garbage, finding value in the cast-offs of others. Part of it was the mortification with myself for not availing myself of a rare childhood find. Once on the two-block walk home from school I passed an apartment building's trash. Treasure of treasures, there were three boxes big as myself filled with the cast-off toys of some unknown child. I wanted those toys with an intensity not unique to children.

These boxes held more toys in private possession than I had ever seen in my young life. I was excited, yet restrained by the potential shame of being seen picking the garbage. This shame was both theoretical and completely internal; there was no one on the street to see me. I couldn't figure out how to get the free toys AND not be seen picking them out of the garbage.

My cousin dropped by later that afternoon. I was obsessed with the boxes of toys. There was nothing to keep me taking any one toy or all of the toys if I chose. Nothing that is except my own, self-imposed shame. Thinking about the toys I realized that if I got my cousin to take them out of the trash for me then the shame of garbage picking would fall on him and not me. That was an excellent solution to my quandary and he was game so we went out to get more toys than either of us could carry.

My disappointment was far greater than his when we got to the apartment building's trash. All the toys were gone! The only thing left was a few broken off toy-parts, left there to taunt me. Those toy-parts mocked me in their brokenness. They laughed at me for not taking advantage of a once-in-a-childhood's opportunity.

Garbage became important years later as an adult. Living in a factory building in the Garment District I learned after moving in that I had to pay for garbage collection. The fee was determined not by how much garbage I generated but by the square footage of my loft. This may have made sense in 1929 when the building was constructed for manufacturing use but made no sense for little me and my single bag of trash.

This was no small matter in the Garment District. A big, burly man came by to collect the bill. I noted that I could tell everything he had for lunch and probably dinner too just by looking at the food stains on his shirt.

I thought of that big, burly man when I stumbled on his offices. Outside were the trucks that collected the fabric trimmings and other scraps from the rag trade unloading their trash. To my surprise another aspect of their business was "wool reprocessing". The big, burly men of Manhattan's Garment Industry were actually very progressive, recycling the trash of one group to produce new products - - all at a profit.

Anyway, should Katie ditch Tom now?