hudebnik

We have an architect neighbor who likes to lead tours of "historic houses in the neighborhood". This past weekend he instead arranged a tour of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport, led by one of the hotel staff, and it was surprisingly interesting.

Some time in the 1950's Howard Hughes, owner and mercurial dictator of TWA, saw architect Eero Saarinen's face on the cover of Time magazine, called him up, and said "I'd like you to design an airport terminal in New York City," adding the magic words "Price is no object." Saarinen took the job and designed what was then called the TWA Terminal, intended to evoke thoughts of a bird in flight. The whole roof is curves of thin-shelled concrete, with no interior columns holding it up, and lots of slanted glass windows between the roof and the floor. The building was finished and opened in 1962, shortly after Saarinen died. When tourists came to Queens for the 1964 World's Fair, which was also on a "flight" theme (Hughes was a loony, but no dummy), many of them came through this terminal. When the Beatles came to the US to play Shea Stadium and the Ed Sullivan Show, they flew TWA and came through this terminal. Parts of the DiCaprio 2002 movie "Catch Me If You Can" were filmed in this terminal. Then in the aftermath of 9/11, TWA went bankrupt and its properties were sold to American Airlines. AA had no interest in keeping open this old terminal so closely associated with the now-defunct TWA, so they abandoned it.

But somebody (this wasn't made clear in the tour) was interested enough in it to push for the building to get landmark status, and then to shop around to various hotel chains the idea of restoring it as a retro-chic hotel lobby, an ode to a time when air travel was glamorous and luxurious. They found somebody interested, repaired what was broken, built two adjacent buildings off the two "wings" for the actual hotel rooms, and opened a few years ago. Much of the building has been restored to look either as it did in 1962, or as it could have looked in 1962 (e.g. they've repurposed a storage room as a ballroom, with furniture and decor appropriate to the period).

The original flight board (the kind with the number-and-letter cards that flip over with a clackety sound until they reach what they're supposed to say) was restored by the Italian company that made it originally, and now presents a fictitious list of upcoming departing flights to romantic destinations around the world, updated realistically from minute to minute. What are now hotel check-in desks look like airport check-in desks of the 1960's. There's a display of TWA flight-attendant uniforms over the decades, walls of photos of famous people flying TWA from the 1930's-1960's, walls of 1960's TWA-ad artwork, a 1960's Lincoln Continental convertible and a VW Microbus "parked" in front, a 1960's music playlist over the loudspeakers, and a four-propeller-engine, three-tailed Constellation airliner "parked" just out back and converted into a cocktail lounge that you enter through one of those rolling staircases.


Of course the tour guide was a hotel employee, whose job was to promote the hotel and how you can rent these various spaces for weddings, proms, etc. The observation area no longer looks out directly on the runways, because the JetBlue terminal is in the way now, but if you ever fly JetBlue into JFK, there's a red-carpeted tunnel/passageway from the terminal straight into the TWA hotel lobby, and you can check it out for yourself.

Last Thursday, for the first time in fifteen months, we were in Manhattan. Only for the twenty minutes it took to get from the Hamilton Bridge to the GW Bridge, and we didn't get out of the car, but we were technically in Manhattan on our way to New Jersey. We came back, crossing Manhattan again, with a new hound -- our eighth, whom we've named Archie (after Andrews, not Bunker or Mountbatten-Windsor).

Yesterday morning, for the first time in sixteen months, I had a professional haircut. (shalmestere had tried cutting my hair twice in the interim: the first time went pretty well, the second not so much, and she hadn't wanted to do a third try.)

Last night, for the first time, we left Archie in the house unsupervised for an hour or so while we attended a party at the next door neighbor's. We came back when the fireworks in the distance became more frequent, so we could both help calm the dogs.

Today, for the first time in fifteen months, we took public transit. Also for the first time in fifteen months, we were in Manhattan on foot. The occasion was taking a damaged vielle for repair at Matt Umanov Guitars; we also took the opportunity to eat barbecue and gelato. The streets and restaurants were all busy. About half of the people not in the process of eating were wearing masks (although I don't see much point in it any more when I'm outdoors and not in a crowd). This also entailed leaving Archie in the house unsupervised for over three hours. No mayhem seems to have ensued.

Two dreams that I recall.
1) shalmestere wanted me to meet her at Washington Square after work, and she was convinced that I would get confused and try to meet her in Washington Heights instead. I assured her that I knew the difference very well, and would meet her at Washington Square. But my workplace was close to Washington Heights, so that's where I went to catch the subway down to Washington Square. In the dream, the subway enters a tunnel just (say, thirty yards) north of the station, and I was at the entrance to this tunnel. I saw a path right next to the tracks that appeared to go to the platform; I was running a bit late, so I decided to take that rather than going around the outside. But the path got narrower and narrower, and dropped off farther and farther below the level of the platform, so I decided I'd better turn around and go around the outside after all. At which point I saw the train coming into the tunnel behind me, and my concern became not "will I catch the train?" but "will I get out of the narrow part of the path and avoid being hit by the train?" And, as often happens in dreams, my legs suddenly didn't work. Fortunately, the train slowed down entering the station, and I seemed to be escaping when I woke up.

2) Two girls have become friends through their high school French class. One (short, dark-haired, sorta Jewish-looking) lives with her mother, while the other (taller, greyish-brown hair) lives with her father, and the parents meet through them; they sorta like one another, but nothing romantic has happened. They live in San Francisco, and they've all become fond of a particular bakery. The father, in fact, is so fond that he looked up the bakery's flagship store in Montreal, and he wants to go there to study pastry-making, and he wants to take both girls and the mother with him. Mother thinks this is sorta crazy, but what the hell, let's give it a try. There's a shot of a San Francisco street scene, looking up towards one of its hilltops, and it morphs into a Montreal street scene, looking up towards Mont Royal, to indicate that the road trip has happened. And then I woke up to the alarm.

I called the neighborhood pharmacy yesterday to refill a prescription.
"Would you like delivery or pickup?"
"I'll pick it up."
"You are aware that the store is closing for good at 7:30 tonight, right? So you need to be sure to be here by 7:30."
"Wait, what? Closing as in closing? Going out of business?"
"Yes, that's right. Make sure you get here by 7:30."

We started using this pharmacy when we moved to Queens as newlyweds 24 years ago. I don't remember why we picked this one: it looks like a bit of a hole in the wall, but ... I could walk in, and before I had a chance to give my name, somebody behind the counter would grab my prescription and my wife's (we have different last names) and bring them to the counter. Ira, the chief pharmacist, knew what else we were taking and warned of drug interactions. If we were out of something and the prescription was expired, he would call our doctors (whom he also knew) to get the refill authorized; if they were closed for the day, he would "front" us a few days' worth of medication. There were delivery boys with bicycles who would drop a filled prescription in your mailbox and put the charge on your tab, which you would pay the next time you happened to be in the store. The store was a few blocks from our doctors' offices, and when I got a new prescription, there was a good chance it would be ready for pickup by the time I walked there. If not, I would go to the grocery store fifty feet away and come back a few minutes later to pick up the prescription, then walk a few more blocks home. This pharmacy is one of the things that make this neighborhood feel like a small town. And as of this morning, it's gone.

So Friday evening we flew to Roanoke, VA, the nearest airport to the farm where my brother mankoeponymous was getting married. The wedding had a "burning" theme: part Burning Man, part fire-dancers (which has been a good deal of my brother's social circle for the past ten years or more), and since shalmestere and I are old fuddy-duddies who have never been to Burning Man OR (intentionally) danced while carrying or wearing anything that was on fire, we were a little dubious. But everybody was very welcoming, and it was a good chance to see a bunch of my family: my mother, two aunts, an uncle, my step-sister, a step-nephew, my half-brother, and my father. My mother and father, I gather, were halfway through introductions before they recognized one another; I guess they hadn't seen one another since my wedding, exactly 22 years before.

The bride had been in a pep band in college, so a marching band playing Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" accompanied the bride and groom to the space where the ceremony was to take place. (I played pipe-and-tabor, while shalmestere played sopranino recorder; I don't think anybody heard either of us. There was some confusion over what key to play the piece in: my brother sent out sheet music, but it was band score in which all the instruments are in different transpositions. Anyway, it was very spirited and peppy.) The vows were largely about recognizing that both parties are fallible human beings, that it's better to argue fairly and constructively than to not argue at all, that the only certainty in life is that things won't go exactly according to plan, etc. etc. During dinner, about a dozen twenty-and-thirty-somethings testified, passionately, in alternation about how wonderful the bride and the groom are. After dinner, we bid farewell to a bunch of relatives, watched a slide show of alternating kiddie pictures of the bride and the groom, and returned to our hotel before it got dark enough for fire-dancing (see "old fuddy-duddies", above).

Between Saturday morning and Sunday morning, we got to drink some good milkshakes, eat some good barbecue and Southern biscuits-and-gravy, and visit the Roanoke city zoo, which is on top of the mountain in the middle of the city (nice views of the other mountains that surround the city on all sides). It's a small zoo, where one can see pretty much everything in an hour, so it fit nicely between brunch with my mother, step-sister, and step-nephew and our afternoon flight home.

A bizarre but enjoyable weekend.

( Cut for pictures )

I hope that was enlightening and entertaining....

The Greenmarket has ramps, and asparagus, and lilacs, and potted chervil, and....

Last week I called one of our regular dog-sitters to ask about her availability for some upcoming weekend dates. When I finally got her on the phone, she said "I haven't gotten back into my house yet. When I came back after the evacuation, there was a forty-foot boat in my front yard. I had four feet of sea water in my [one-story] house. Everything was destroyed: furniture, clothing, appliances, everything. I've been living in a hotel for seven weeks, and my own dogs are still in boarding. They say there's some chance of me getting back into the house in February."

There are still thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people in her situation.

One of my department colleagues, who lives much farther from the ocean, got back into his house only around Christmas, and the last time I spoke to him he still had power in only half the outlets in the house.