David Isay

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“The Sixteen-Block Stretch Of Lower Manhattan Was Jammed With Barber Schools, Bars, Missions, Men’s Clothing Stores, Slop Joints (Cheap Restaurants), Flophouses, And Tattoo Parlors”

May 29, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

There are used paperback copies of the book on Amazon for as little as $1.62.

Photographer Harvey Wang and radio documentarian David Isay gravitate to those people, places and things that have passed into obsolescence in our culture and capture their essence before they become obsolete. They focus a good deal of attention on NYC, a place that changes rapidly, often driven more by the lure of the dollar than the pull of history. The two collaborated with Stacy Abramson on the great 2000 book, Flophouse: Life on the Bowery, which looked at the lowly boarding houses that still stood in that famous (and infamous) neighborhood like anachronisms with bedbugs. But despite their shabby shape, these lodgings were filled with the fascinating stories of the tenants, which Wang and Isay chronicled with great care. You can listen to audio documentaries about the flophouses here. The opening copy of the book:

“From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, the Bowery was the world’s most infamous skid row. Under the shadow of the elevated Third Avenue line, the sixteen-block stretch of lower Manhattan was jammed with barber schools, bars, missions, men’s clothing stores, slop joints (cheap restaurants), flophouses, and tattoo parlors. The estimates vary, but in its heyday somewhere between 25,000 and 75,000 men slept on the Bowery each night.

Today the barber colleges are all gone. Al’s, the last rummy bar on the Bowery, closed in 1993. There are no tattoo parlors, no employment agencies, no pawnshops, no burlesque houses, no secondhand stores, no El train. All that remains of the skid-row Bowery are a single mission and a handful of flops, still offering the shabbiest hotel accommodations imaginable for as little as $4.50 a night.”

More Harvey Wang and David Isay posts:

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“There Was A Flash News Report On The Television That Said That A Congressman Has Been Shot And Possibly Killed”

February 1, 2011 in Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Congressman Leo Ryan was an inveterate reformer, critical of conditions in slums and prisons and an early opponent of Scientology.

David Isay’s excellent StoryCorps site, which allows people to share oral histories, has new audio from Erin Ryan, whose father, Congressman Leo Ryan, was assassinated during a 1978 fact-finding mission in Guyana as prelude to the Jonestown massacre. She was recorded in Washington D.C. in the days after the attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ life. An excerpt:

“The night before he went on the trip to Jonestown, he had had dinner at my apartment. I was going to college at Georgetown University, trying to teach myself how to cook, and it was just a chance to hang out with my dad. Dad had done a lot of adventurous things in hid life, and everything had always turned out well, so we didn’t talk a lot about the trip. You know, I think looking back if I had known more I might have been more concerned. I heard the news around eight or nine o’clock in the evening, and there was a flash news report on the television that said that a congressman has been shot and possibly killed…pretty much that was it. It was gut-wrenching to not know what was happening. I mean, I can still feel it to this day when I think about it. It was brutal, and we struggled then for a very long time. You know, my message to the families of the victims of this tragedy with Congresswoman Giffords and those who were killed…for me it’s been 32 years and it can still bring me to tears, but you can’t make that a defining moment of your life. I’ve always said to myself that I was lucky that he was my dad, and that I was lucky to have had him for the years that I had him…and that’s what you have to hold on to.”

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“It Took Bean Twenty Years Of Planning And Saving Before He Was Finally Ready To Build His Own Theme Park”

January 19, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From dust jacket flap: "This book is a tribute to some of America's greatest characters, people holding on to unique ways of life at all costs."

When I recently put up a post about Harvey Wang, it reminded me that in my whole life in New York City, I have only been the victim of theft one time and the stolen item was an excellent 1996 book called Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes, which Wang co-created with David Isay. I believe my house painter nicked it several years back when I left him alone in the apartment for a couple of hours.

The book, about eccentric Americans (snake handlers, coon-dog graveyard caretakers, hat blockers, burlesque museum curators, etc.) who aren’t willing to be swallowed whole by a homogenized culture, is definitely worth stealing, though I paid a few bucks for a replacement copy. An excerpt from the chapter, “Donald Bean, Proprietor, Dinosaur Gardens, Moscow Texas”:

“‘I Thought I Saw a Dinosaur’ reads the welcome sign to Moscow, Texas, an unincorporated hamlet ninety miles north of Houston. There isn’t much more to the place. Indeed, the number of dinosaurs residing in Moscow rivals the town’s population, all thanks to the retired carpenter named Donald Bean.

‘I try to keep this as much as I can like it would have been back then, you know,’ Bean explains as we begin our tour through the roadside attraction. Canned dinosaur sound effects erupt from small speakers hidden in trees. We round the corner and come upon the theme park’s first dinosaur–Elasmosaurus, a twenty-foot-long flippered beast residing in a murky bog of water, surrounded by a ring of pond scum. ‘If you cleaned it out,’ Bean explained, ‘it wouldn’t be a swamp.’

All told, Donald Bean’s roadside attraction consists of exactly eleven worn fiberglass dinosaurs laid out along a winding trail cut into the woods behind his home. Bean opened up Dinosaur Gardens in 1981–the culmination of a lifelong fascination with these prehistoric creatures. ‘I always liked dinosaurs. They’re large…they’re big, and they ruled the world for years…Thousands of years…Well, millions of years!’ Donald Bean came up with the idea for the theme park in the late 1950s when he happened upon a similar roadside attraction in Oregon while vacationing with his wife, Yvonne. ‘Soon as I saw that I said, ‘That’s what I want to do!’ So I did it’

It took Bean twenty years of planning and saving before he was finally ready to build his own theme park. ‘My wife wasn’t too for the idea right off the jump go, because we spent our life savings on it.’ The park cost the Beans $100,000 to build, and when Dinosaur Gardens opened it was met with just about the level of enthusiasm one might anticipate for a dinosaur theme park in the heart of Moscow, Texas. The masses did not seem to share Bean’s fervor for creatures prehistoric. There were no lines at the ticket office. It kind of disappointed me,’ Bean says, wiping a spider web from Struthiomimus‘s mouth. ‘I don’t know how many people I thought would come, but I thought there’d be quite a few.'”

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