By Polly Kreisman
PROMPT — The way I see it ...
Stacks of tomorrow morning’s freshly printed papers lean against a shuttered newsstand, bundled with rope like unopened gifts; the mastheads read “November 7, 1978.”
The strike that shut down the Daily News and the New York Times for 88 days is finally over. The papers again sell stories about a city that is dirty and glamorous, terrifying and thrilling, and which seems to make up the rules as it goes along.
“God damn this fucking road!” Eddie, the TV cameraman, grips the steering wheel as we head back to the newsroom in one of the beat-up news vans, emblazoned with a giant logo and “We’re the One You Can Turn To!” painted on the side. It bumps and bounces against the dilapidated, elevated West Side Highway, passing ramshackle piers and a few other cars; on the older concrete sections blocked off for demolition, rest abandoned vehicles. A few stray dogs roam.
There’s a political fight over whether to turn the West Side Highway into a futuristic parkway called Westway, but for now, it is just another gritty, decaying piece of New York that is impossible to imagine a future for. Husks of old buildings loom on the cliffs above the roadway and New York Hospital throws a shadow as far as the Hudson River.
It’s so desolate, that vintage color photos of this stretch of road, which leads to the newly completed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on the horizon, appear to have been shot in black and white.
Earlier today, we were sent to the Queens County Courthouse where a verdict is expected for a suspect in a cop shooting. I’m a young production assistant with a rare chance today to ride along with the reporter and crew. The reporter is Bobby McMurphy, broad shouldered with a dark mustache, a hyper-active, easily distracted, pot smoking Irishman standing 6 '2". Bobby runs up the courthouse steps two at a time. Cameras are not allowed. Soon, he is sprinting back, a finger hooking a jacket over one shoulder, heading straight for a phone booth on Queens Boulevard. “A verdict. I’m calling it in!”
Other reporters are on his tail. He hangs up the phone, digs in his pocket, pulling out a roll of Out of Order stickers from Ma Bell and covers the coin slot. “Sorry, it’s broken,” he tells the others, who turn away grumbling and scowling. It’s now an exclusive.
Every day, crews rumble through the neighborhoods: Brownsville, Astoria, Throggs Neck. Coop City. Stuy Town, speeding down the Deegan, the LIE, the Franny Lew. We’ll go wherever there’s a story. Once, I talked a crew into driving to the Hampton Bays to do a story on a beached whale. McMurphy had me sit in its mouth where it lay dead in the sand to illustrate its enormity to viewers.
Riding along is a thrill, streets and playgrounds and bodegas at every edge of town, people I never could have met. “The truck” is jammed with a couple of TK-76 cameras, battery packs, tape consoles, tangles of cable, a swivel chair, 3 boots, a milk carton full of maps and five of us: Eddie, the photographer, an audio man named Jerry, McMurphy, the “truck op,” who is the engineer needed for a live shot; and me.
The scanner on the dashboard glows red. The FDNY radio squawks, a voice declares a 10-77, a multiple dwelling fire, calling engines and ladders to a scene in Hunts Point, The Bronx. We head for the Expressway.
The toll at the Whitestone Bridge is 75 cents, cash only, which slows us down to a crawl for nearly an hour.
Smoke is visible as we cross into the Bronx. The assignment editor radios us that four people are being taken away by ambulance.
At the scene, firefighters yell for backup as powerful surges of water arc up into windows of an apartment where vicious orange flames rage inside.
Ribbons of yellow police tape blow skyward in the smoke. Several victims wrapped in blankets watch helplessly. Several TV crews beat us here and are already shooting. Eddie has been with the station for 20 years, working radio, then film, and now “ENG,” electronic news gathering. He heaves the huge camera onto his shoulder. Jerry trudges over with the giant tape deck resting on his protruding gut with the strap around his neck, the way he’s done it a million times. He pulls out a pair of comically enormous earphones and raises the shotgun mike to get “natsot,” natural sound of sirens, shouting, crying, flames licking the air.
“Get back!” The police hold a crowd of spectators and direct us to the Battalion Chief, who knows McMurphy.
“Over here!,” McMurphy shouts over the chaos to the crew, grabs the mic, and starts an interview with the Chief.
“So, what happened? Arson?”
In official verbal shorthand, the Chief lays it out while the other stations’ crews clamor to squeeze in. They always seem to follow McMurphy wherever he goes.
“We received the call at 16:27 today, arrived on scene to a multi-unit in approximately 3 1⁄2 minutes, numerous on fire escapes in heavy smoke conditions. Engine is working to extinguish the fire, Ladder brought people down from the upper floors. We have 9 injured, 4 transported to Bronx Lebanon, including two firefighters with possible smoke inhalation. Fire Marshals will be conducting an investigation.”
McMurphy turns and sticks the mic in front of a witness who’s been waving him down.
“Can I be on TV? OK! I never saw anything like it, it just suddenly, I just looked over and saw the flames. My sister here called 911!” Then, “Will I be on the news?”
Jerry ejects the ¾” tape, I run it to the truck and give it to the engineer for the microwave feed back to the station. The truck signal actually has to hit our tower on “Empire,” the Empire State Building, first. The engineer has raised the 35-foot antenna on the telescoping microwave mast and established a signal. This technology is new, exciting, revolutionary, making images of the City accessible in minutes.
McMurphy scribbles in a reporter’s notebook as the director in the control room talks to him through the IFB in his ear. He checks the second hand on his watch while the crew pulls cable for the live shot, and sets up the camera on a heavy metal tripod. He hears the anchorman read the toss, while the Director counts 3-2-1, then “GO !”.
It leads the 11:00 news. McMurphy live: “Two firefighters raced up the stairs of the burning building and rescued four residents, including a baby, who are in stable condition at Bronx Lebanon.” Engineers back at the studio insert the soundbites we fed in a few minutes earlier, and then it’s back to his live tag.
Behind him, In the noisy crowd held by the police barricades, people wave and yell hoping to be seen on camera while McMurphy speaks, laser-focused on the lens.
Then, “Back to you in the studio.” It’s done.
The mast slides down, we pack up, we roll up the windows and drive away, leaving behind the noise, the smoke, the sirens, and the wave of adrenaline that will carry a generation of journalists through fires, shootings, perp walks and injustices, secrets and scams.
Soon, we are back on the West Side Highway, headed to the newsroom, and into the night again.
At around midnight, a group of us gather at the curb on Columbus Avenue, in the acrid scent of urine and festering garbage, trying to hail a gypsy cab that won’t refuse to drive someplace he doesn’t want to go.
There are the bars on Prince or Mercer in gritty Soho, where the lofts of 19th Century cast iron warehouses are being transformed by urban squatters rigging plumbing and electricity, creating apartments and a neighborhood.
In Tribeca, the Mudd Club is hidden inside an old paper factory. We squeeze through the crowd and head for the back bar, filled with models, actors, and transvestites. Naked male and female performance artists stand on a block of ice in roller skates.
Or we ride to the entrance of Studio 54, by this hour a mob scene, the bouncers alert to the familiar faces I’m with — the famous local TV correspondents at a time when there are very few, all household names. The velvet rope unsnaps, and we spring from the cold, past the paparazzi and a long line of shivering hopefuls, sinking into a cavern of pounding disco music and bodies swirling under spinning spotlights as hundreds of red and pink sponge hearts fall from the ceiling.
New York Magazine says the year 1978, was “New York at its most New York.”
Daylight brings chaos anew. The fire story we aired last night makes the morning headlines in the papers, but we’ve moved on. The newsroom is buzzing. Even at 9 am, cigarettes burn down to the filters in tin ashtrays, or balance on half-empty soda cans. I try to answer telephones that don’t stop ringing. It’s like a game of Whack-a-Mole, the clear plastic buttons lighting up faster than I can push them down to answer the calls.
Of course, most callers are complaining, often demanding to speak to a specific reporter, to report absentee landlords, drug dealers on the corner, shootings, assaults, purse snatchings. Some might drop the occasional tip - that’s a call you hope for.
Writers bang on noisy manual typewriters. The UPI wire machine rattles as it pushes out a spool of teletype copy. Red lines appear on the margins as the paper is about to run out, as it often does.
Occasionally, one of the senior reporters might walk a couple of us down the hall to smoke a joint in an empty studio where Wonderama was once filmed before a live audience on Sundays.
Today, I’m assigned scripts. I return to a messy pile of 7-ply script paper; each page in the individual book is a different color that must be collated for the role assigned: Anchor, Director, Assistant Director, Chyron Operator, not an easy task when you’re stoned.
Most days, I work inside, assisting the Assignment Editor at the “desk,” not only answering those endless calls, but pulling news of shootings and press conferences from the wire, listening to police scanners, and calling the reporters and cameramen on a console of two-way radios to direct them to scenes we map from a library of thick worn spiral bound atlases of New York City.
“Unit 4, there’s a job in the 4-2*, you’ll want the BQE to exit 7. DCPI* will meet you at the scene.”
There’s that language again, veiling the excitement of the chase. Whatever we cover just spreads more darkness and fear. And If it bleeds, it leads. The newspapers taught us how:
Headless Man in Topless Bar
Ford to NY: Drop Dead
Triple X Porn Palace Busted in Times Square
Blackout: 24 Hours of Terror
Son of Sam has finished his reign of horror. John Lennon will be murdered outside the Dakota. A mobster named Carmine Galante will be shot to death on a restaurant patio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A photo of his dead body with a cigar still in his mouth is splashed on every front page. A reporter spends a night in the Amityville Horror house participating in seances with clairvoyants and demonologists, where a man killed 6 members of his family, because “voices from the house” made him do it.
We follow fear out of town, too, dispatching local New York reporters to Three Mile Island, the “troubles” in Ireland, the Jonestown massacre in Guyana.
I knock on the office door to bring a star executive his 65-cent cup of coffee in a blue paper cup with the Anthora design. “We are Happy to Serve You,” it says. Each day I deliver coffee, and each day he finds a new way to behave inappropriately.
#metoo would be as foreign here as an invasion of aliens. I’m flattered. I’m terrified. Other female production assistants whisper of unwanted advances.
That exec leaves a few months later for another station in a different city. At his going away party, he is celebrated as the station’s moral compass. My boss sits at the assignment desk carving lines of coke. The tip of a small handgun peeks above the top of his cowboy boot.
Many nights after the show, instead of heading downtown, one of the Anchormen leads a group of us across the near-empty Avenue to a row of dive bars. Chipps, O’Neals, The Red Baron. At Tap-a-Keg, (“a Hell of a Joint” it says under the name on the awning) the worn red wallpaper mural of dogs sitting around a table drinking and playing cards, is rapidly peeling around the initials and obscenities carved into it. A chalkboard next to the bar proclaims, “Beer is much more than a breakfast drink.”
We talk and drink until closing.
“Are we doing the headless parking meters?” someone asks.
“We should do a whole series on this f-ed up city, it’s all falling apart,” says one of the producers signaling the bartender. “Forget the broken parking meters, have you driven across the Manhattan Bridge?
“All the bridges are falling apart,” a reporter says.
“The waterfront is a stinkin’ disaster,” says one of the writers. West End Avenue is a mess since they closed the West Side HIghway.
“Have you been to the zoo?” someone asks “Even the animals are neglected.” I’m too embarrassed to ask my family to visit.”
“Ha! What about the Woolworth building? It’s freaking crumbling!”the anchorman lights his cigarette. “It’s covered with a net so it won’t crash down on someone!”
“And potholes! The potholes are unbelievable,” says a reporter sipping a bourbon and soda. “I’m gonna do a story on it.”
“The papers say the city needs $24 Billion just to stay where we are,” responds the anchorman, blowing a cloud of smoke.
“That’s the story,” says the producer. The city is falling apart, and nothing can save it.”
Walking on Columbus Avenue half a century later, I count how many of those people are gone. The row of old dive bars is a Reebok Sports Club; nearby, a Gap, Lululemon, West Elm, and Target. Young mothers push expensive strollers with water bottle and coffee holders and a little fan blowing on the baby. One speaks too loudly into the speaker of an iphone that’s clipped into a stand on top.
Soho and Tribeca, too, are now enclaves of prosperity, wealth, and exclusion.
The West Side Highway is smooth and fast. You won’t need an atlas to navigate, there’s GPS. There are no more gypsy cabs but there is an unlimited supply of double parked ubers. Bridge and tunnel tolls can no longer be paid with cash.
Hundreds of newspapers folded, of course, and there are too many TV channels to count. But who watches a newscast anymore? Anyone can shoot anything anywhere with a cellphone. I have adult kids now. They get their news on TikTok and Instagram.
There’s no smoking. Pot is legal. But last week I saw one decaying phone booth on West End Avenue.
Maybe this is New York at its most New York.
----- *4-2 - Forty Second Precinct
*BQE - Brooklyn Queens Expressway
*DCPI - Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, the office responsible for dealing with the press
Polly Kreisman, a former Emmy Award-winning Investigative Reporter on NYC TV, transitions between roles as a writer, actor, and reporter—each a testament to her passion for storytelling. Her writing has been published widely, and she maintains a connection to journalism, as Publisher of one of the oldest community news sites in the country, larchmontloop.com. As an actor, she can be seen on episodic TV, including the new Netflix series, “Nobody Wants This.” A Cornell University graduate, Polly is mom to young adult twins and two very bad dogs. She writes from Larchmont, New York.
コメント