John Delach

Part Two: The Moses Empire

While America slept, World War II raged in Europe, Robert Moses, (RM) opened the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair while completing about 75% of the Belt system plus the Grand Central Parkway and the Interborough Parkway. He also extended these roads into Nassau County by way of the Northern and Southern State Parkways and a separate network of parkways that serviced Jones Beach.

From the Northwest corner of Queens, the Triborough Bridge access highway connected with the Grand Central Parkway and the northern end of the Brooklyn-Queens Connecting Highway (soon to be re-christened the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, (BQE).)

The Connecting Highway only ran about a couple of miles before reaching a dead end at Northern Blvd. in Jackson Heights. A one-mile long gap to Queens Boulevard followed. At Queens Blvd, he constructed an elevated highway above the road that divided New Calgary Cemetery that headed south to a junction with the Midtown Tunnel Expressway and the entrance to the Kosciusko Bridge that crossed Newtown Creek into Brooklyn. The highway ended at Meeker Avenue in Greenpoint in a maze of streets. South of the bridge stood RM’s greatest challenge to completing the Belt; a series of high density neighborhoods. All work ceased until the war ended. Planning did not.

RM had to force his Connecting Highway through Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Clintonville, Fort Green, Downtown Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights, Red Hook, Gowanus and Sunset Park before it could reach the Belt Parkway in Bay Ridge. This route also had to connect to the Williamsburg Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Simultaneously, RM was busy with two other equally arduous projects, the Long Island Expressway (LIE) and the Cross-Bronx Expressway (CBX). Robert Caro in his biography of RM, “The Power Broker,” concentrated his reporting on RM’s arbitrary forced displacement of thousands of Bronx residents to push the CBX through densely populated areas on a straight line. For whatever reason, Caro chose to ignore the misery of the residents of Maspeth, Queens in the path of the LIE and all those in the way of the BQE.

Maspeth was a suburb of mostly one-family connected houses built just before and just after World War II. Unfortunately for some of these residents, their homes were in the path of where RM wanted the LIE to go. Worse yet, the expressway cut across Maspeth’s grid on a diagonal ripping out whole blocks at a time to include its service roads. Further east, the LIE was constructed along what had been Horace Harding Boulevard. Again, the old Blvd. couldn’t accommodate the new six-lane highway and two service roads so all the houses lining one side of the new highway had to go.

The tell-tale signs of Sherman’s march to the sea were the railroad rails bent into bow ties and the free-standing brick chimneys where factories and plantations once stood. The tell-tale signs of a RM built highway are the absence of buildings facing one or both sides of the highway.

Unlike Sherman, RM understood who he could screw and who’s asses should be kissed. The BQE is a classic case. South of the Kosciusko Bridge, Meeker Avenue only went about halfway to the Williamsburg Bridge. Another grid had to be crossed on a diagonal and Moses pushed an elevated highway through with a vengeance. Same M.O. south of this bridge. To bypass the Brooklyn Navy Yard, RM widened Park Avenue and built an elevated viaduct above this misnamed avenue at the same time the City of New York was tearing down elevated subway lines as being unsightly nuisances; go figure.

Upon reaching the Manhattan Bridge, the BQE ran through an old industrial area before reaching Brooklyn Heights. Now, boys and girls, the name Brooklyn Heights conjures wealth. Remember, Moonstruck, the Cher / Nicolas Cage film? Cher’s family town house was in Brooklyn Heights.

RM put the engineers to work and they produced a brilliant solution. They would build the highway at the very edge of the bluff and cantilever it over the road above the docks in three layers stacked one above the other. The bottom two layers would each support three lanes of traffic and the top layer, a pedestrian promenade overlooking the harbor and Downtown Manhattan. This created a spectacular view for strollers to enjoy. But, more importantly, for the millionaires whose homes lined the lots facing this view. Do I hear a nay? The yays have it.

The folks living south of Brooklyn Heights in Cobble Hill didn’t have this clout so all they got was a depressed highway, but they lost all the homes that once occupied that trench. To make the run south from the Gowanus Canal to Bay Ridge, RM selected Third Avenue to be the route. Like Park Avenue, this section became an elevated highway and Third Avenue was widened accordingly.

The Belt stood completed except for that annoying gap in Jackson Heights. Over the years, RM ate away at it, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the last section opened.

By then. God got even, and RM met his Waterloo. Still, by then he was an old man when this came to pass and, only the good die young.

(To be continued.)

Part One: The Moses Revolution

And Jehovah did command of Moses: “Speak to my people,” and Moses replied, “Shut up God! There’s a new builder in town and my will be done.”

And Robert Moses’ will was done throughout the state of New York from Buffalo to Montauk Point and from Lake Champlain to Totenville, Staten Island. My goal for these pieces is to provide some background to explain the utter frustration and insanity of having to drive from the town of Port Washington to various locations in Brooklyn and return. Over the last fifteen years, we have navigated RM’s creations to visit our daughter’s family in Park Slope, Sunset Park and currently, Clintonville.

Any story about traveling by automobile on Long Island or anywhere in New York State begins with the influence of Robert Moses (RM) on their design and routing. When it comes to highways, what exists and what could have existed all bear RM’s imprimatur. For over forty-five years, beginning in 1924 and ending in 1967, “almost anything RM wanted, RM got and whatever RM rejected was rejected.”

All of this is available in Robert Caro’s 1974 biography of RM, The Power Broke., But, if you are not up to reading 1162 pages of text, stay the course. RM knew how to get things done and politicians flocked to him because he let them shine as the prime movers of successful projects big and small. In return, these politicians allowed RM to accumulate vast power over all aspects of life in the Empire State especially NYC and Long Island. Parks, public housing projects and “so called” middle class houses like Peter Cooper Village, Stuyvesant Town, Riverton, Parkchester and Fresh Meadows.  RM built public beaches like Orchard Beach in the Bronx, Jacob Reis in Queens, Jones Beach and its twin on Fire Island that bears his name together with hydroelectric power plants at Niagara, gigantic swimming pools in every borough and parks from Riverside to Sunken Meadow State Park on Long Island.

Armed with the title of chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, (TBTA), RM controlled the construction of six major bridges and two underwater tunnels. Separately, he built the Tappan Zee Bridge and the New York State Thruway.

RM touched every aspect of our lives. Along the way our grateful politicians named a beach, bridge, hydro-electric power plant and state park in his name.

RM’s hero was his mentor, Al Smith. RM never forgave FDR for not adequately supporting Smith’s run for president in 1928 and treated FDR like a rented mule when he succeeded Smith as New York’s governor. The historical reasoning is that RM’s slights prevented RM from becoming a bigger player in the development of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. To that I say: “Balderdash!” Everything the Federal engineers used to build this system, both good and bad was learned at the feet of RM.

RM’s first priorities were parks and he quickly realized that a sure way to create new parks was to create new roads to serve them. In the mid-1920s, Brooklyn and Queens had only five semi-highways, all with traffic lights. Brooklyn had Ocean Parkway running south from Prospect Park to Coney Island and Eastern Parkway heading east from Prospect Park before it faded out in Brownsville.

Queens had Northern Boulevard, little more than a four-lane street, Sunrise Highway no better, in the south, underdeveloped, Queens Blvd and Horace Harding Blvd. that began at Queens Blvd and headed east toward Nassau.

If you read “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald takes license when describing Northern Blvd. crossing the Carona coal cinder and slag dump where his hero met his fate. (Thanks to RM, that dump would become the sites of the Grand Central Parkway, 1939-40 and 1964-5 World Fairs.)

His first major divided highway project was a vast network of six different roads that connected into one endless loop that ran along the shorelines that cover most of Brooklyn and Queens and along the border between Queens and Nassau County. The original name described its routing: “The Circumferential Parkway.”  Fortunately, this tongue twister was shortened to the name that stuck, “The Belt Parkway.”

RM learned early on to seek financing in incremental amounts but don’t use the money to complete a single structure or section. For example, when it came to constructing the substantial and beautiful bath houses in Jones Beach, RM proposed building two but used the money to build the foundations for all six. If you start it, they will fund the amount needed to complete all six.

Likewise, the first sections of the Belt Parkway were constructed where they ran right along the shore in uncontested, undeveloped areas. The first sections to open in Brooklyn were along Bay Ridge and Gravesend Bay that included a park that ran the length with a spectacular view of the Narrows and the Outer Bay.

Another section ran along Jamaica Bay including Canarsie Park and Pier with a third section that began at the site of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows then headed northeast to the newly finished Whitestone Bridge, where it turned easterly and headed through underdeveloped Whitestone to Fort Totten. Here it turned south along the side of Little Neck Bay, Alley Pond Park and Belmont Racetrack where it turned west and passed Idlewild, Aqueduct Raceway and Howard Beach where it joined the Brooklyn section at Jamaica Bay.

(To be continued.)

When I last reported on the popular sentiment in Golden State on March 8, 2017, #Calexit was all the rage. To hell with the remaining 49 states, the beautiful were cutting loose and moving out. Oh dear, it appears that something bad happened somewhere along the line. It seems that Louise Marinelli, the president of the prime movers, Yes California, shut the effort down on April 17, 2017. A report read that…” Marinelli’s connection to Russia was hurting their funding.” And so, it goes.

Do not despair, boys and girls, the good folks in the Land of F & N never leave good things alone. Denied the opportunity for a messy divorce from Uncle, what a better notion than to blow up your own neighborhood? Truth be told, these good folks have too much good weather and too much time on their hands. I recall the proverb, “Idleness is the devil’s workshop.”

Their latest devil is Timothy Draper, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The New York Times reported on June 13^th, that Mr. Draper is leading a coalition…”to break up California, citing its unwieldy size. In November, California residents will get their chance to vote on his latest proposal: to divide the world’s fifth-largest economy into three separate states.”

Draper’s proposals would establish three entities, Northern CA, Southern CA and plain old California. (I wonder what their Zip Codes would be? NC and SC are already taken. I predict CN and CS.)

Northern California would run south from the Oregon border through Silicon Valley. Plain old California would be a super-sized Gaza strip occupying a coastal preserve about fifty-miles wide to just south of LA. Southern California would be land-locked until it reached the Pacific south of LA. From there it would enjoy a coast to the Mexican border including San Diego.

Insanity, you betcha! Still, Draper’s initiative will be on the ballot this November. Draper garnered enough signatures to put it on the ballot. Such is the current state of the State of California in this day and age.

Wait: STOP THE PRESSES!

As God is my witness, only a day after The Times published this piece, the following headline ran in the paper of record: At Risk in a Big Quake:39 of San Francisco’s Top High Rises.

Where can you go

when there aint no

San Francisco?

Better get ready to

tie up de boat in Idaho!

This is serious. Thomas Fuller reported about a U.S. Geological Survey that lists 39 downtown skyscrapers, hotels and office buildings potentially vulnerable to a large quake. Mr. Fuller noted:

“Engineers have known about defects in certain steel-framed buildings since 1984, when shaking from the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles fractured critical joints in more than 60 buildings, bringing one very close to collapse.”

Oh dear, oh dear, but the F&N crowd could care less. They live the good life and make up their own rules as they live the life they love and love the life they lead.

Sorry to ruin your day, those of you who live and / or work in San Francisco but here’s a partial list of vulnerable buildings:

The Hartford at 650 California Street and no name buildings at 425-555-201-101&345. On my, oh my, oh my; the list includes the heart of San Francisco’s elite business addresses, One, Two and Three Embarcadero Center. Major corporations are not exempt including, Pacific Gas & Electric, Chevron Tower, Citicorp Center and the iconic Transamerica Tower. The list also included hotels like the Hilton San Francisco, the San Francisco Marriott and the Hyatt at Union Square.

Mr. Fuller subsequently reported his own “come to Jesus moment” on the Monday before his piece ran in Tuesday’s Science Times. “It was around 7:30 p.m. I was sitting in my 12^th-floor office. Then the building jolted and rattled like a train lurching out of a station.

“It was a mini earthquake, a 3.7 magnitude centered across the San Francisco Bay.”

What bothered Mr. Fuller was his workplace was on the list! How do you say, “Too close to home?”

Fuller decided that he owed his colleagues a note of warning about his forthcoming piece. “I sent a note to 20 or so reporters and editors in the bureau to alert them both to the issue and the story about it.

“What came back from them was an escalating series of bad puns.

‘I’m shaken. I hope it doesn’t fracture our community.’

‘What a jolt. I’m sure this story will create quite a stir.’

‘I’ll be working from home for the next, oh, seven years.”

Do you know the swim?

you better learn quick, Jim.

If you don’t know that swim,

better sing thee hymn.   

One: Adrift in a Sea of Doctors

There is little question that modern medicine allows us, the aging of America, to live longer and live better. This includes new wonder drugs, better procedures, more thorough examinations and those machines that lead to more accurate diagnosis.

The bad news is those same machines have incentivized doctors to rely on them not only for their results but also for the added revenue they generate from Medicare. Not only does each test generate a separate charge, the results open the door for more and more tests and prescriptions. This is especially true for those of us on Medicare. The Feds created Medicare and, like any government program, it is subject to stringent rules and regulations. Uncle guarantees payment but only so much. Uncle never pays doctors or hospitals what they want but enough to make tests profitable. Therefore, more tests equal more profits.

Once we enter into the system, we are off and running going from one test to another. Last spring / summer, my medical adventures centered around my prostate. This year doctor’s concerns were aimed a bit further north covering cardio and pulmonary issues. Along the way I was introduced to a bevy of machines and examinations some more than once. I have had PSAs, 4Ks, MRIs, Ultra Sounds, Cardiograms, Echo Cardiograms regular and nuclear stress tests, MRIs, CTEs and more blood tests than an Olympic Athlete.

Now I have been told I need a controlled overnight test for sleep apnea. WTF! This is so far off the mark that enough is enough. Senor y senora doctors, no mas!

Two: Living on a Glacier’s Edge

Granted, this happened 2.6 million years ago but I finally gained insight into the last great ice age. Thanks to the Science Times Section of The New York Times I now understand how the topography of Long Island was formed by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the last great glacier to cover North America. I grew up in Ridgewood, Queens a rather hilly neighborhood. The good Dominican Nuns at St. Aloysius grammar school insisted we lived on a coastal plain. But we knew differently. All we had to do was look around to see this assertion was nonsense. However, nuns being nuns, we had little choice but to accept their version of the truth or face their draconian reaction to our perceived insuborbination.

William J. Broad’s piece finally explained this incongruity. “Much of North America once lay under a thick sheet of ice. Its final retreat left the city with a singular geological legacy. The ridge of rubble deposited by…the glacier shaped the later development of New York City. The Laurentide ice sheet ended in a sheer cliff across… (the city.) The ridge, called a terminal moraine, is visible today as a band of hills, parks, golf clubs and cemeteries across these boroughs.”

By Jove, it appears the ice sheet did almost as much to affect Long Island as Robert Moses!

One of the places we visited when I was a kid was Highland Park. I marveled that the southern end of the park ended with a rather large cliff. Sometime in my youth an adult pointed out that this cliff was formed by the ice age an explanation I accepted that without further details. Now I have those details thanks to Mr. Bond.

Ridgewood is not alone. This is a list of the communities the terminal moraine passes through beginning with Staten Island: Richmond Valley, Arden Heights, Lighthouse Hill, Dongan Hills and Clifton. The ridge crossed The Narrows until this defacto dam was destroyed in a great flood by water cascading down the Hudson Valley. The ridge enters Brooklyn at Bay Ridge, heads north east through Sunset Park, Green-wood Cemetery, Park Slope and Crown Heights.

From there it turns east and crosses into Queens at Cypress Hills. Today the Jackie Robinson Parkway travels along the terminal moraine and through the Cemetery of the Evergreens, Highland Park, Cypress Hills Cemetery, Forest Park and it’s golf course. The route continues through Ridgewood, Glendale, Richmond Hills, Forest Hills and Kew Garden Hills. Further east, the ridge passes through Jamaica Hills, Hillcrest and Hollis Hills before passing into Nassau.

Eventually, it formed the cliffs at Montauk Point.

“The ice over Manhattan would have buried even the tallest skyscraper and was so heavy that it depressed the underlying bedrock. As it melted, giant boulders embedded deep within its flanks landed throughout what became the city. Many are still visible in Central Park, unlikely obelisks scored by time…the hilly ridge around NYC tends to be quite prominent. Its maximum height is roughly 200 feet, about that of a tall apartment building.”

All the land south of the terminal moraine was formed by the outwash of sand and sediment carried by thousands of streams from the melting ice. This outwash created the great Hempstead Plaines the home of potato farms, early aviation and multiple post World War II subdivisions. “Without this sediment most of Long Island would be under water.”

Bottom line: Those Dominicans were correct after all but with one big asterisk.

It was called the Marshall Plan, and if not for a small group of forward thinking American statesmen who are now mostly forgotten, Western Europe as we know it would have disintegrated. Generalissimo Joe Stalin and his Soviets successors would have been the masters of a new European order while the United States retreated to the other side of the Atlantic.

This happened in 1947 and, trust me, it was far from easy. America had little interest in becoming involved in European affairs. Dragged into World War I, the post war Senate rejected joining the League of Nations and America returned to our natural state of isolation.

Isolation was in our DNA, placed there by George Washington in his farewell address when he chose to preserve our Republic by not accepting an un-apposed third term.  He admonished us “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world, above all Europe.”           “Europe,” he said, “has a set of primary interests which to us have a remote relation.”

When Hitler came to power, we hid behind the ocean that protected us refusing to consider much less confront the growing menace. Once the shooting started in 1939, America First, Father Coughlin and the American Bund attacked FDR for his short of war policy. They stood fast hoping to prevent a repeat of Wilson taking us into World War I.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 instantaneously erased any isolationist thoughts as America flipped a switch and declared total war in Europe and the Pacific. That National will combined with our wealth, economic capacity, manpower and those two oceans produced the arsenal for democracy; a safe place to build an army, air force and navy and produce enough material not only for the USA, but sufficient for our allies, especially England and the USSR to achieve total victory.

VE-Day, (Victory in Europe) arrived on May 8, 1945 and VJ-Day (Victory over Japan) on September 2, 1945. Once the celebrations ended, America de-mobilized. By 1947, only 1.5 million men remained under arms from the 12.2 million at war’s the end. However, our troops occupied US zones in Austria, Germany and Berlin (as we did in Japan.) The USSR, British and French occupied the other three zones.

The Soviets had no intention of going home deploying their army throughout Eastern Europe. To be fair, Stalin, despite his growing paranoia, established a buffer between Germany and his Motherland to prevent a repeat of Hitler’s 1941 invasion. It is estimated that the USSR lost ten million soldiers and eleven million civilians in the war against the Nazis. The generalissimo established a militarized buffer as the rights and aspirations of the citizens of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungry, Rumania and Bulgaria were of no concern to Stalin.

Western Europe, on the other hand, was near collapse. Currencies were worthless, their infrastructures lay in ruins while coal and other fuel sources were scarce Hunger and deprivation ruled the day. The continent was covered by armies of displaced people fleeing the Communists or just trying to return to homes and families that no longer existed. The rule of law had ceased to have meaning. An organized black-market ruled the distribution of food and goods, an outgrowth of years of brutal German occupation. These black-market operators prospered as great shortages and busted economies couldn’t offer alternatives.

Great Britain fared little better. The economy at home was in shambles, the nation close to bankruptcy while its empire disintegrated.

Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, William Clayton, George Kennan and Lucius Clay were the architects of the Marshall Plan. Truman decided on the name explaining that his secretary of state and former five-star general’s name was a better choice than his own: “If I send a plan to a Republican congress calling on America to spend billions in Europe and call it the Truman Plan, it will D.O.A.”

And it came to pass that despite so many reasons for the plan to fail, congress authorized this most generous and unprecedented expenditure for a period of five years. Between 1948 and 1952 the United States Treasury transferred $14.3 billion to Western Europe ($143 billion in today’s dollars.)

Success though didn’t happen because our nation and the congress compassionately embraced a starving Europe. The architects realized early on that in the realm of American politics and popular opinion, altruism wasn’t high on our agenda. National security was, and, because of his paranoia, Stalin misplayed the cards he was dealt so badly, almost everything he did, backfired. His disruptions and pig headedness only made the Soviets the bad guys and the people of Western Europe saw the writing on the wall.

The failure of Stalin’s Berlin blockade to starve the city into submission and lay low the USA was his Waterloo. For sure, it may not have been the beginning of the end of the USSR, but it was the end of their European expansion. (The Berlin wall was a monument to failure.)

The Marshall Plan gave birth to West Germany, and resurrected Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and the UK. It committed America to defend Europe and NATO quickly followed! Once America committed to treating and attack on a member’s homeland as an attack on our homeland, including nuclear retaliation, Western Europe stabilized under America’s nuclear umbrella knowing a return to isolation was dead.

Our terms for European participation insisted on a united Europe thereby intentionally providing the groundwork for the EEC and the EEU.

The wall came down in 1989 and freedom for those enslaved nations soon followed. Not too shabby a legacy!

(If you are interested in reading the complete story, I highly recommend: The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, by Benn Steil.)

Students of America’s Civil War battles know that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was the hero of the struggle for Little Round Top fought on the second day of this momentous battle. Chamberlain led his 20^th Maine Infantry out of their lines and down eastern slope routing the charging 15^th Alabama infantry to save the day. Awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, he went on to survive the war, become governor of Maine, president of Bowdoin College and lived a full and public life passing in 1914 at the age of 85. Chamberlain’s fame was revived thanks to his portrayal by Ken Burns in his Civil War documentary.

Fate didn’t serve Patrick Henry O’Rorke nearly as well. O’Rorke wasn’t awarded the Medal of Honor and Ken Burns found no reason to include him in his documentary. Worse yet, he was cut down at his moment of triumph by a bullet through his throat. His widowed bride of less than a year, the former Clara Wadsworth Bishop, joined the Sisters of Charity in Providence, Rhode Island where she remained until her death in 1893.

Born in 1837 in the ancient town of Brefini, County Cavan, Ireland, O’Rorke’s parents brought him to America settling in Rochester, NY in 1842. In 1853 he was offered a full scholarship to the University of Rochester when only 16 but declined and took a job as a marble cutter to support his family when his father died. Four years later he was appointed to West Point and graduated first in his class in June of 1861.

Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineering, he served at the First Battle of Bull Run where his horse was killed from under him. That autumn he provided vital engineering service for the construction of the batteries on Jones and Tybee Islands, Georgia for the siege and bombardment of Fort Pulaski guarding Savannah harbor. O’Rorke was selected as one of the officers who received the Confederates surrender following the fort’s capture.

He returned to Rochester in the spring of 1862 where he married Clara on July 9^th.

In September he offered his services to New York State and was commissioned as a colonel and commander of the 140^th New York Infantry Regiment a unit comprised of Irishman and other volunteers from the Rochester area. “Although Colonel O’Rorke believed in strict discipline,’ one of his soldiers wrote that every man in the regiment ‘knew that in his colonel, as long as he did his duty, he had a friend.’ Another soldier described O’Rorke as the ‘ideal of a soldier and a gentleman.”

The 140^th was present at the battles of Fredericksburg in December of 1862 and Chancellorsville in May of 1863 but they were held in reserve and didn’t see action.

O’Rorke’s regiment was part of the 3^rd Brigade under the command of Brig. Gen. Stephen H. Weed which arrived at Gettysburg on the second day of fighting on July 2, 1863. Weed was ordered to bring his brigade up to the front and join General Daniel Sickles’ III Corps. As they approached the front lines the 140^th last in formation encountered Brig. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren who was desperately searching for units to prop up the meager forces holding Little Round Top. Wikipedia romantically states that Warren implored O’Rorke to disregard his instructions and said, “Never mind that, Paddy, bring them up double-quick and don’t stop for aligning. I’ll take responsibility.” Wikipedia’s version goes on to note that “O’Rorke caught up to his regimental colors and mounting a rock to urge on his men, was struck in the neck and fell dead.”

Both notations of what really transpired appear to be false. (Never trust Wikipedia!)

Warren did instruct O’Rorke to send his 526 strong regiment in the direction of the 16^th Michigan that was failing under the intense pressure from the 4^th and 5^th Texas then preparing their third assault of the day. O’Rorke sent a messenger telling Weeks of his change in plans and “…ordered his men to move double-quick to the summit. Upon reaching the summit, the men did not have time to fix bayonets but rushed to support the 16^th Michigan.”

This action was unorthodox and not to be found in any drill manual. Accomplishing this feat demonstrated the skill and discipline O’Rorke had instilled in his regiment. His men fired individually as they crested the summit. The Texans returned fire and O’Rorke fell dead. Several New Yorkers fired at this soldier and his body was found to have 17 bullet wounds.

Hand to hand fighting ensued as the Texans were driven from the western side of the hill at the same time Chamberlain was clearing the eastern side. Faced with these failures, Robert E. Lee ordered a general withdrawal and so ended the day’s battle.

“Patrick O’Rorke and the men of the 140^th arrived at a critical moment to shore up the crumbling (Union) flank. Colonel O’Rorke may not deserve the title of the hero of Little Round Top, but his actions should earn him the recognition on a par with Chamberlain.”

In 1889, the state of New York erected a monument to the 140^th on the western face of the hill featuring a brass relief bust of Patrick O’Rorke.

If you visit the battlefield be sure to make a stop on the western ridge of Little Round Top. O’Rorke’s aquiline nose is the most prominent feature on the monument and, in a curious twist of human irony, rubbing it is considered a good luck charm. As a result, his nose looks as if it had been polished that morning even though the rest of his bust and the stone is weathered and worn.

Perhaps fame comes in different disguises?

The second I stepped into one of those four ancient subway cars, the memory of that old, familiar smell ignited my senses. Electric ozone, a not unpleasant odor, filled my senses as it had since I first rode the subways with my mother in the 1940s. All those rides to all those places, movies in Times Square, shopping at Macy’s and Gimbles at Thirty-Fourth Street, adventures in Coney Island, voyages from Whitehall Street on the Staten Island Ferry and sweet sunny days at the Canarsie Pier. Later in my teens, trips to Madison Square Garden for Ranger games, the Polo Grounds for the Mets and Jets and Yankee Stadium for the Bronx Bombers and the New York Football Giants.

The odor always present, was joined by a vague taste of steel in the air. Sounds once common, also returned. As I sat on the waiting train my ears picked up the idling DC electric motors as they thumped and whirred until the motorman put them in gear. As the train began to move these electrical devices gave off a cacophony of bangs and booms as the carriages shook off their inertia and begrudgingly moved off into the waiting tunnel.

This excursion began at the Grand Central subway station that served the Forty-Second Street Shuttle Line. Sponsored by the New York Transit Museum, it was called Centennials & Cemeteries. About 50 ticket holders had gathered at the Museum store inside Grand Central Terminal where we were escorted down to the shuttle station. As soon as a shuttle train departed from Track 1 bound for Times Square, the four IRT (Numbered train lines) Lo-V cars entered the station from the opposite direction. As we boarded we could see that we were greatly outnumbered by subway workers, some on the job running the train, some providing security and crowd management, but mostly, subway buffs like many of us.

Not all were transit buffs, though. Our destination was the Woodlawn Station at the top of the Bronx celebrating it’s 100 anniversary and a tour of Woodlawn Cemetery. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2011 by the National Park Service, Woodlawn’s celebrated lot owners include VIPs like Robert Moses, Herman Melville, Joseph Pulitzer, Fiorello LaGuardia, Celia Cruz, Admiral David Farragut, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Charles Evan Hughes and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”

Our little train began the journey by heading downtown on the Lexington Avenue (East Side numbered) Line on the local tracks south to the City Hall loop. The train moved slowly along this route as the train ahead made all stops from Thirty-Third Street to Brooklyn Bridge. South of that stop, we entered the loop that passed the abandoned and museum quality City Hall Station, the stop where the First Subway originated. The chandeliers and wall lights were all illuminated providing an excellent view of this historic station. The loop continued back to the north bound local tracks at Brooklyn Bridge.

From there excitement reigned supreme once the train left Brooklyn Bridge. No regular scheduled trains were operating on the express track making it our exclusive province. The motorman opened the throttle allowing this consist to travel uptown at the generous speed limit. What a feast of sounds, sights and smells as we roared through the tunnels and the local stations. These Low-Vs were built between 1916 and 1925 and they acted accordingly. We bounced and bucked continuously, conversation was impossible there was so much noise while a breeze manufactured by the moving train filled the cars with the same subway scent I remembered from old New York subway tunnels, the London Underground and the Paris Metro.  The motorman only slowed down to a more reasonable speed when we rolled though the express stops at Union Square, Grand Central, Fifty-Nine Street and Eighty-Six Street. What a run, there is nothing like riding a New York City subway express going full out especially one that felt it would fall apart at any moment.

The train became elevated as we approached Yankee Stadium and we continued northward through the Bronx past eleven more stops and such sights as the Kingsbridge Armory (once the largest indoor floor space in the world), Lehman College and Mosholu Parkway to the Woodlawn Terminal.

Coincidentally, Mosholu Parkway, a three-mile car only roadway connecting the Bronx Botanical Gardens and Van Cortland Park was built by Robert Moses in 1937 and remains a Bronx treasure.

This happened on Sunday, April 15, one of those many unpleasant days we were forced to endure this past winter and spring. The air was filled with a biting wind and enough moisture to make it miserable. I decided that the train ride was enough for me and chose to call it a day and ride a southbound Number 4 train back to Grand Central.

Seeing Robert Moses’ resting place would have to wait for another day.

A Guest Blog by Geoff Jones

Ralph and I were seniors at Briarcliff High School. His family had multiple cars and his favorite was what we called a Jeepster. an elongated Jeep with a frame and canvas roof/siding. One day Ralph drove a group of us to a drag strip somewhere near Cornwall, in the hills north of West Point. On the way home, the Jeepster’s engine made a loud noise and just died as he pulled to the side of the road. We left it there and our friends drove us home. I agreed to help Ralph retrieve it the next day.

We conceived a plan to tow it back to Briarcliff using my big beat up 1954 Buick with plenty of power. The next morning, Ralph and I with another friend drove up Route 9A past Camp Smith and onto Bear Mountain Road, a curvy two-lane road that led to the Bear Mountain Bridge where we crossed the Hudson River. We continued past West Point and up a road that goes up and around Storm King Mountain, another steep, curvy and dangerous road.

I had an old but thick Manila rope which we tied between our bumpers. Ralph took the Jeepster wheel, I drove the Buick with our friend riding shotgun with me. We left about 15 feet of slack between us for safety and started out. The early towing was easy as it was level and even the uphill wasn’t bad aside from a few jolts when our speeds differed too much. We quickly realized that downhill was a problem. If I saw Ralph getting too close, I’d tend to speed up at about the same time he realized he was getting close. This produced some real snaps, but the rope held.

When we reached the Bear Mountain Bridge I remembered too late that we had to stop and pay the toll. We’d given little thought to this complication and it occurred to me that since what we were doing was illegal, not to say nutty, the toll taker could be a real problem. The bridge is in a state park, so the tolls were run by some sort of cop.

Undaunted, we coasted up and I gave the toll taker money for both of us and stuck out my hand to indicate to Ralph not to stop. Remarkably the guy did nothing. To this day I still think he was so dumbfounded he didn’t know what to do and didn’t call it in because he might have trouble explaining how he happened to let us through while collecting both tolls.

Back on the Bear Mountain Road, we pulled on to a shoulder to plan things because if you’ve driven it you know it’s tricky. We decided to tow him to the top and release him to coast down toward Camp Smith. We drove to the top just fine, found a big overlook to park in while we untied. Then we pushed him out onto the road and waved goodbye. Ralph started slowly but began gathering speed as he disappeared around the first bend. We returned to the Buick and took off to catch him at the bottom.

But we forgot something. That was just the first of several downhills separated by long enough stretches of level road that killed Ralph’s momentum. In a few minutes we caught up to him and stopped where there was no shoulder. Working in the road with nothing to alert drivers approaching from behind, we had to hook up the Jeepster again and resume towing Ralph to the top of the hill before us. We crested it, stopped, untied and pushed him off for another downhill ride.

Once again, we caught up to him in a few miles only to find the Jeepster at the bottom facing another hill. We did it all over and this time he rolled to the bottom a mile or so from Camp Smith. This was the end of Bear Mountain Road, so we hooked up and towed him from there down Route 9A to the exit before the old Putnam line railroad station.

There we exited onto the main road that led to Ralph’s garage located directly across the street from the police station. I gulped as I spied, Bob Whiting, a Briarcliff policeman standing at the front door wide eyed as we pulled in. Fortunately, Whitey knew me well from umping high school games and was one of the few nice cops on the force.

He strolled over and we tried to explain what we’d done. I remember him saying something like. “I didn’t see you, you never spoke to me and if you say anything I’ll guarantee to ticket you every time I see you until you graduate.”

We kept our word for at least for a few months by which time Whitey mentioned it to me when I came to bat in a game. He actually thought it was dumb but funny.

Step in a little closer, ladies and gentlemen and observe that I have nothing up my sleeves. I come before you today with the deal of a lifetime. I kid you not but let me warn you that I shall not pass this way again any time soon. Observe the little red card I hold in my hand. The Moviepass Mastercard. It’s a debit card property of the Fifth Third Bank but it can be yours.

Folks hear me out, this little red card is your entrance to endless entertainment on the big silver screen any day, every day at movie theaters throughout the United States of America. Armed with this little red card, you may walk into a participating theater each day of the week and see a motion picture of your choice for free. You heard correctly; F-R-E-E, free, free, free!

You ask, “So what’s the catch?” There isn’t any catch. All you need do to obtain this little red card is to have a smart phone. You download the Moviepass app, fill out the application on the app and register your credit card number with your new pals at Moviepass. They will charge your credit card $9.90 a month and send you the little red card in seven to ten days.

“I sense skepticism! Do not fear and let your hearts be glad. I guarantee your credit card will not be billed until you successfully use your little red card for the first time.

Think of the possibilities: you can see 30 movies a month for the sum of $9.90. You say $9.90 is too much, how about $7.90? No; how about $6.90? Ladies and gentlemen, you must agree this is the deal of a lifetime.

Our daughter, Beth, first told us about Moviepass in early February. We took the $9.90 plunge and received our cards later that month. My first attempt didn’t go well. The rules that accompanied my card seemed simple enough, go to the theatre armed with your smartphone and debit card. On arrival in the lobby, activate the app for that theatre, the movie you want to see, the movie start time and check in electronically. Once my app confirmed I was checked in, all I had to do was present my debit card to the cashier who will print my ticket. But when I arrived at the Stadium multi-plex in Westbury, the app would not connect. I went so far to seek assistance from the theatre’s customer service rep. without satisfaction. Humbled, I thanked her and returned home.

Rather than give up, I tried using the app at our local theatre in Port Washington where it worked just fine. I had no desire to pick the movie about to begin so I gave my ticket to a waiting customer who successfully used it. As a second test, Mary Ann and I returned to the Stadium that had defeated me. This time, she successfully used her card. She picked Peter Rabbit as her movie. She asked the next person in line if he was interested in that movie? When he said yes, she made his day by giving him her ticket.

Since then we have enjoyed the following movies on Moviepass: Darkest Hour, Black Panther, The 3:15 to Paris, Red Sparrow, Game Night, A Wrinkle in Time, Stalin’s Funeral, The Leisure Seekers, Outside, In, Lean on Pete and Chappaquiddick.

To say this is a movie goer’s bonanza is at best an understatement. Not only does it provide a ready-made incentive to see the movies we truly want to see, it entices us to take-in less desirable films that we wouldn’t ordinarily considering seeing.

It works like a charm. Are there restrictions? Of course, there are. There is limited access to e-ticketing so advance purchase from home is severely limited. It doesn’t include 3-D showings or IMAX and so-called “stadium theatres” showing block-buster movies like Black Panther. Operators who know they will be mobbed can opt out of accepting Moviepass for new openings. But other than these slight inconveniences it is swell.

Truthfully, our problem is we keep looking over our shoulders waiting for the ultimate implosion. Someone is not making money. We’ve asked ticket clerks if this was hurting them? They laugh and say, “Not at all.” They are satisfied with amount they receive and are paid immediately thanks to the debit card.

Is this a Ponzi Scheme? Does Moviepass have a complicated business model we can’t contemplate? Or is this a means to some other end?

Who knows, not me. I sense somewhere a clock is ticking but until this bomb goes off, Mary Ann and I will ride these horses as far and as long as they will take us, and should a day of reckoning come around, we’ll take solace in an old warning that we expect will be Moviepass’ epitaphic:

It was too good to be true and like most deals that appear to be too good to be true, they usually are too good to be true… and so it goes.

(I will be traveling next week so the next edition of “On the Outside Looking In” will appear on May 23.)

On April 8, 1968, New York Magazine reappeared as a new stand-alone weekly magazine. My heart leapt with joy to discover this offspring of the late, great New York Herald Tribune had sprung back to life. Prior to the Trib’s demise, New York Magazine had been their Sunday magazine section and featured the Trib’s stable of outstanding writers. I had high-hopes for this new venture, but I soon realized we had a disconnect. Their editors designed the content with an elitist Upper East Side focus that disappointed me. I also suspected that these editors would be disappointed if they knew they had a subscriber like me and so began my love / hate relationship with New York Magazine.

I first discovered the New York Herald Tribune while a student at St. Francis College in Brooklyn in 1961. My newspaper experience growing up was limited to The Daily News and Daily Mirror in the morning and the New York Journal-American at night. College opened my horizon but one look at The New York Times turned me off. All those columns and tiny headlines on the front page reminded me of a tombstone.

The Trib lived right next to The Times on every newsstand and I quickly took a liking to its off-beat approach and especially, the collection of skilled scribes, writers and reporters like Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, Art Buchwald, Tom Wolf and Red Smith. These were giants who could go toe to toe with anyone The Times could bring to bat.

Little did I realize how fragile newspapers were and that their golden age was about to disappear forever. The demise began when Thomas Murphy, the head of The Newspaper Guild, led the largest newspaper union out on strike against The Daily News on November 1, 1962. The other newspapers foolishly joined ranks and ceased publishing. This prolonged the strike / lock out which still could have ended with a reasonable solution. However, on December 8^th, Bert Powers, the radical president of the NY Typographical Union, led his Local 6 out on a bloody strike with outrageous demands that would destroy the newspaper industry as we knew it.

By the time the strike ended in 1963, several newspapers were severely damaged. The loss of holiday advertisement for the 1962 season was put at over $100 million and post-strike circulation dropped by almost 12%. Powers name became a curse word outside his union, as the man who killed newspapers.

The Daily Mirror succumbed on October 15, 1963 with the remaining papers deeply wounded yet trying to continue.

The post-strike Trib gave birth to New York Magazine in 1963 as a new concept to enhance its ability to compete with The Sunday Times Magazine. It did enhance my love for The Trib. Breslin and Schaap’s columns regularly ran as did Buchwald’s giving me an extra dose of their journalistic ability. Unlike the later magazine, it had a man-on-the-street approach to covering the city. (Then again, with Jimmy Breslin, how could it not have had this approach.)

The Trib soldiered on for three more years before raising a white flag. That was when a grand merger of three of the traditional but ailing newspapers was announced early in 1966. The Herald Tribune, Journal-American and the World-Telegram & Sun would combine operations producing two daily newspapers, the morning Herald Tribune and the World Journal in the afternoon.

The new entities were scheduled to debut on April 25^th, but several newspaper unions went out on strike against, “this cost-cutting consolidation (that) also meant the loss of many jobs for typographers, reporters and editors.” A settlement wasn’t reached until September 12^th, 140 days later.

These strikes gutted the new entity, reducing it to a single evening newspaper now christened as the World Journal Tribune. The cripple lasted just over a year until Friday, May 3, 1967. The headline on the last night of business proclaimed: “World Journal Tribune Ends Publication Today.”

I’m not sure how many times I re-subscribed to New York over the years but my M.O. was consistent. I’d see an issue with an article that reflected the city that I believed in. I’d sign on, once again only to be disappointed and turned off by the glut of opinions counter to my own. My last renewal began several years ago. Somehow, I signed on for a perpetual subscription. I kept looking for renewal notices, but none were forthcoming.

Granted, occasional pieces were noteworthy, but it was a slog. Meanwhile, New York, like many other magazines suffered under E-commerce and subscription rates fell off over the last few years. Eventually, they reduced their frequency to two issues a month which extended my subscription. Last fall I received notice that my subscription would expire in the spring.

Any consideration that I would possibly renew ended when they ceased mailing the magazines and bought into a cheaper delivery service. Their magazine would be delivered by the same drivers who brought us Newsday, our local morning newspaper. Delivery has been haphazard at best. I estimate that I have missed at least half of the editions since they began using this service.

I kept waiting and finally the day of my salvation arrived. I received the March 19-April 1 issue clad in a red cardboard jacket that proclaimed: “LAST ISSUE: RENEW NOW!”

No phone calls, e-mails or telegrams.* Perhaps they finally had enough of me too. Whatever:

Adios New York Magazine, I’m free of your clutches at long last!

*Does Western Union still send telegrams?