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Saturday would have been Charlie Parker's 89th birthday, so it was a good day to take in the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival at Marcus Garvey Park. Despite the threatening skies everyone was having a good time. Gary Bartz was playing when I arrived and the Frank Wess Quintet closed out the show with an excellent set. Wess was burning up the stage with more energy than I expect to have when I'm 87 during the last number I saw.
I'm off to the land of fire until next weekend.
Although downtown Gloversville is struggling today, it must have been thriving during the early urban renewal efforts of the 1960s as most of the older buildings and storefronts still survive. That means there's plenty of attractive tile floors in the doorways. These three were among the fanciest.
Gloversville Public Library
Lucius S. Littauer Jewish Community Center
Spirit of Progress
Gloves were good to Gloversville. Between 1880 and 1950 ninety percent of the fine gloves made in the U.S. were made in Gloversville. All that glove money led to lots of nice buildings in town. Well, the Carnegie Library was built with steel money.
Lucius Littauer's father was a glove factory owner and Lucius worked for him after graduating from college. Later he served five terms in Congress and sat on the New York State Board of Regents. Littauer built the Jewish Community Center and the hospital in Gloversville. Among many other philanthropic gifts he also donated money to help found what is now the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Gloversville, New York, in the Mohawk Valley, was once an important center of leather production and, as you might guess from the name, the leading glove-manufacturing location in the world. I don't think there's too many gloves being made in Gloversville anymore, but it is an interesting place to grab a sandwich and spend an afternoon looking around.
The writer Richard Russo grew up in Gloversville. His first novel, Mohawk, is set in a fictionalized version of the town, and his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Empire Falls, is a much better written version of Mohawk. I wasn't thinking of the novels while I was there otherwise I would have taken a picture of the downtown diner.
The Glove Theater opened in 1914 and was eventually the home base for the 120-theater chain owned by the Schine family. The theater is being renovated by volunteers in the community. Among the mementos in the front window of the theater is an autographed photo of Ernest Borgnine, which gets two thumbs up from me.
Amidst all the destruction in Central Park I came upon a dramatic "Nature, red in tooth and claw" moment. An Eastern cicada killer wasp was carrying a cicada it had paralyzed up a London Plane tree. Well, it was trying to carry the cicada up the tree.
As big as the wasp was, the cicada was bigger. The wasp tried to fly while holding on to the cicada but it was not a great moment of aeronautical skill. The two sank rapidly until crashing with a loud thud into a branch. The wasp recovered and flew away while the cicada, being paralyzed, didn't do much of anything. I picked up the cicada and posed it on the branch.
This was a wooded area on the Great Hill.
Two trees down between Lasker Rink and Harlem Meer.
Root ball displaced on the Great Hill.
Disoriented raccoon in a chestnut tree.
Last Tuesday I was sitting at my desk when I noticed a few flashes outside. A quick look out the window confirmed that the flashes were lightning, so I grabbed my camera and tripod to take pictures. Before I could get the window open it started raining as hard as I've ever seen it. The official measurement in Central Park, to the south of the microburst, was 0.64 inches. My semi-trained estimate for those of us in the center of the storm's path was at least 2-3 times that much. All in 15-20 minutes.
The storm was tiny, maybe a half-mile across. It hit Riverside Park around 99th St., moved into Central Park between 99th and 100th Streets before moving up toward the Great Hill and along the Ravine. Leaving the park it hit southern Harlem and East Harlem and then traveled over Randall's Island and the South Bronx. The Parks Department estimated that 500 trees were uprooted or otherwise severely damaged.
I finally got a chance to check out the damage on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. The extent of the damage is shocking, especially on the Great Hill and near the west 100th Street entrance. Two small groves of trees were totally wiped out, the majestic yellow chestnut tree at 100th Street was a branchless trunk, the giant London Planes had their leaves blown off and the bark removed from the windward side. The poor raccoon above was totally disoriented. It went up and down the tree and kept looking around, acting confused.
Because of the Asian Longhorn Beetle infestation the wood from the trees can't be saved. Clean up crews were busy yesterday cutting down the trees and running them through wood chippers. They were also busy chasing nosy photographers away from the Great Hill. Luckily there was nobody on the hill on Friday night, so there are plenty more pictures on Flickr.
I was done writing about Las Vegas but I heard an interview this evening with a reporter who a cover story about the city in this week's Time magazine. Well, it's the cover story if you're buying the European edition of last week's Time but they didn't mention those details in the radio interview.
The Golden Nugget, where I stayed on my last night, is on Fremont Street, the original Las Vegas Strip. The Strip long ago moved to unincorporated land south of the city, where developers could develop to their heart's content. Fremont Street is still trying to recover from the move. The old casinos are kind of cool but several times every evening their exteriors go dark for several lame light shows along the street.
The shows are kind of depressing. The great lights on the casinos get turned off and the canopy of lights overhead go into action. Technically the show is kind of amazing. The twelve million lights cover four or five blocks. However, when the show, an animation vaguely set to a song, starts everyone stops dead in their tracks and stares upward for five minutes. The show ends, the casino lights turn on, and everyone starts walking again, no doubt in anticipation of the next light show in a half-hours time. A couple of people appeared to be shooting me dirty looks when I walked around while the show was in progress.
All was not a loss on Fremont Street. The coffee shop in the basement of Binion's is the place to get an enormous, tasty and cheap breakfast. It was made all the better by watching a guy two tables away pass out head first into his bacon and eggs. Topping that performance was the waitress tucking the check under his arm.
It took me the longest time to figure out what is going on with this sign.
Unrelated:
Are you a fan of maps, Ohio, and pianos? It doesn't matter! Explore the music of Ohio via this clever flash animation of Ohio (which has 88 counties) as a piano (which has 88 keys) on cartogrammar.com. Look for the "Ohio is a piano" link.
Is this building at 86th and Lexington the ugliest building in New York? Perhaps, but it didn't make these lists.
This was a good weekend for blueberry ice cream. Or blueberry gelato. The recipe is a hybrid. The abundance of fresh blueberries is gelato-like, but the massive amounts of heavy cream make it more like a Philadelphia-style ice cream. By either name it is refreshing to have a bowl during the first hot weather of summer.
Bonus portion of the recipe: The warm blueberry sauce makes a delicious topping for pancakes.
In honor of today being the 50th anniversary of Kind of Blue, here is So What and Kind of Blue/Made in Heaven, the documentary about the making of the album, Part I, Part II and Part III.
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