Yesterday at about 12.30 I found myself crossing Delancey. I thought, 'Hey, I'm crossing Delancey'. That's how it is for me in this city. Everywhere I go there's something charged with meaning. The day before yesterday I was walking up from Times Square towards Central Park and I came to Carnegie Hall. For me Carnegie Hall is - or was, first - this. That's back in Bulawayo as the 50s were turning into the 60s or thereabouts. The Benny Goodman concert. Above all 'Sing Sing Sing'; and, within that, a piano solo by Jess Stacy that is two or three minutes of immortality. I went in, to see what was on, and coming up on Sunday (today) at 4.00 was The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater. That's me at the ticket window then. Sold out. Expletive deleted.
Anyway, the whole city is replete with personal and cultural meanings. Take it away you pomos; give out your stuff. Me, I'd prefer to walk the streets of New York - any day of the week.
Why I was crossing at Delancey at 12.30 yesterday was that I'd just been at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side and signed up for the 'Piecing It Together' tour. This was to see some of the tenements at 97 Orchard Street and to be told about two families who had lived there - and about the garment industry - by our tour guy, J.R. McCarthy, Educator. J.R. is a man of words and of some pazazz in their delivery. By him we were told that between 1865 and 1935 20 million immigrants from Europe had passed through this district, and that if you are Jewish in America there's an 80% chance that your first ancestor in the country started off living somewhere close by. I was surprised also to learn - though I have not checked this, so can't vouch for it - that German-Americans constitute the largest single US ethnicity. We were taken through the lives of Harris and Jenny Levine, who lived in this tenement in 1897, and their children Pauline, Hyman, Max, Eva and Fay. We then moved on to the Rogarshevsky family. J.R. finished in some style.
I headed off to meet a New York city blogger in Greenwich Village, and that involved crossing Delancey.