New York city Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

The suitcase retrieval

Nor’easter

NEWLY-PLANNED: Sunday, September 27 – On Friday evening, after I called my wife, my daughter called me to ask what I was thinking about regarding the suitcase retrieval. I had left it on the bus from Syracuse to NYC when I got off in Binghamton.

I thought that there should be a way to send the luggage up by bus, but this would mean more work for Andrea. So I decided I should take a bus to New York City.

My wife and daughter had been in NYC Wednesday through Friday, having seen School Girls or, the African Mean Girls Play (which they loved) and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) (great acting, but plot holes).

So, my daughter offered to come to NYC (drive to Poughkeepsie, Metro-North train to Grand Central Station) on Sunday. Wonderful. There was only one potential downside: a Nor’easter was racing up the coast. So, it’s settled; the plan is on.

The point of it all, apparently

On Saturday, I had called my father’s first cousin Ruth, who witnessed firsthand my father coming up my name shortly after I was born. She offered to pick me up Sunday morning and take me to the bus station.

As she and one of her daughters had picked me up quite early, we talked about family lore, about Raymond Cone, and the resilience of my paternal grandmother Agatha, Ruth watching Leslie and me when we were little, and my father’s amazing creativity, coupled with his utter lack of fiscal restraint.

REALIZATION: Suddenly, I realized why I needed to be in Binghamton the weekend of my dad’s 100th birthday: to share Les stories with people he’s related to.

But what about not seeing 5 Gaines Street (42.107838 latitude, -75.915621 longitude), the house I grew up in that’s now for sale? I had friend Cee and spouse keep the 12:30 pm appointment and share the intel with sister Leslie and me. (Thanks!) I’m not saying either of us would move there, but it is an intriguing concept. Especially for my sister, since the housing costs are so much greater in SoCal.

It’s too bad I didn’t get to go to church at Trinity A.M.E. Zion, the church I grew up in, but I got to ride by it a couple of times; it’s less than two blocks from 5 Gaines. When I went by there on Friday night, a bunch of kids from the church were playing on the lawn, which I found oddly comforting.

Big Apple

NEW PLAN: The bus station in Binghamton does NOT announce or display arrivals or departures. So at 7:45, I went out to look for my 7:55; yup, it was just about to board. I said my goodbyes and got onto a Trailways bus to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, which, not incidentally, was MUCH more comfortable than those Flix buses I rode to Syracuse and Binghamton. It rained intermittently on the trip, but it wasn’t bad.

Around the same time, my daughter was driving from Albany to Poughkeepsie. It turns out that, because of the counterclockwise winds, the rain from the Nor’easter was worse on the trip down than on the return trip, especially around Woodstock and Kingston. She almost stopped for a time but persevered, reaching Poughkeepsie and taking the Metro-North to Grand Central.

My sense of direction was all out of whack, and I couldn’t figure out how to reach Grand Central. Some official sent me to Penn Station on the 7 subway, but my daughter directed me back.

Suddenly, I wandered to an S shuttle that took me to Grand Central, and my daughter found me. We took the Metro-North. My daughter has quickly become an expert. We needed to take the New Haven line, but really the Stamford subsidiary line to Westchester County.

The ‘burbs

While we waited for Andrea and my suitcase, we overheard a couple of friends who had met at the train stop. She was a trained dancer hired by a rich Manhattanite to perform at the wealthy lady’s two-year-old’s birthday party. But there were so many other people and stuff that there was no room to dance. The hired Santa assured her that it was a weird, albeit well-paid, gig. The friends realized we had been eavesdropping on their conversation – they were only about ten feet away – when I couldn’t stifle a laugh. They were cool about it.

Finally, Andrea figured out where we were and got me the suitcase. She suggested I be more mindful; noted. My daughter gave her the wine and chocolate she had bought on my behalf.

We ate at the station, took the line back to Harlem, then took the Hudson line back to Poughkeepsie. My daughter drove us back to Albany. We arrived at 6:40, less than 20 minutes later than I would have if I had taken the bus back to Syracuse, then Albany; oh, yeah, that bus was canceled. How WOULD I have gotten home?

I was exhausted, but still wired. After my wife and daughter went to bed, I noticed I had recorded Sunday Night Football, the match betwen the Los Angeles Rams and the Denver Broncos. About halfway through the first quarter, I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up for the last three minutes, which I watched. It was a great ending to an interesting weekend.

Lydster: New York City twice

Urban Stomp

My daughter went to New York City twice in two weeks. The background: my mother-in-law ostensibly has a timeshare plan, but my wife has been paying for it. Because she’s been busy working, we haven’t utilized the service sufficiently. Fortunately, one of my BILs is taking it over on October 1.

My daughter went to the City in mid-July with her bestie, Kay, and stayed at the location on 45th Street in Manhattan. They attended a very much Off-Off-Broadway play directed by my niece Alexa.

The highlight was going to the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street. I will admit that I had never heard of it. They enjoyed Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection (through October 5, 2025), Urban Stomp: Dreams & Defiance on the Dance Floor (through February 22, 2026), and the ongoing Songs of New York: 100 Years of Imagining the City Through Music. My daughter rightly assumes I will love that latter exhibit.

Part Two

The final week of July, my wife and daughter went to New York. My wife had never been to the Manhattan property. I’d been there thrice, once with my sister Leslie and twice with my daughter, and my daughter and I insisted that she go up to the 33rd floor at night.

My wife and daughter went to the Guggenheim Museum at 1071 Fifth Ave., designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The daughter was particularly taken by the Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers exhibit.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, is “located in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District—steps away from the Hudson River Greenway and the West Side Highway.” Unfortunately, the highlight of their visit, the Amy Sherald: American Sublime exhibit, ended on August 10; it had been featured on CBS News. You’ll likely recognize her famous portrait of Michelle Obama if you don’t know her name. But the collection has over 26,000 works representing 6000 artists.

Our daughter, who relished the return trip, took my wife to the Museum of the City of New York. On Wednesday morning, they had brunch with cousin/niece Alexa before returning home.

I should note that they went down to NYC the same day that some guy drove from Las Vegas to Manhattan and shot several people in a Manhattan office, killing four. Although I knew my family was safe – they were at least ten blocks away – it was oddly unsettling.

The day after their return, there was flooding in NYC, including the subway near Grand Central Station, where they had been just the day before. Their timing was remarkably good.

The nine-word problem

boycott

I relate to the nine-word problem. It is the superficial understanding of race and racism in the United States.

As someone who has spent some time providing programming about Black History Month this century, I recognize that there’s much more to know and that much of it had been hidden. Indeed, many of the things I’ve written about in this blog about race are things I did not know at the turn of the Millennium. I, too, am learning about what’s going on.

Some of it is historical: for instance, the Red Summer of 1919 and Tulsa. Other aspects are ongoing: misogynoir; The Color of Law’s look at redlining; the unjustified killing of a black man redux.

Then there’s appropriation. Even about Martin, I’ve tried to expand the discussion beyond one address. I’ve linked to several speeches before and after 1963, usually posted around his birthday. Also, MLK is Not Your Wingman.

The Largest Civil Rights Protest You’ve Never Heard Of

On February 3, 1964, there was a massive protest in the United States.

“’Selma!’”

“’Birmingham!’”

“’Washington, D.C.!’”

“My students slowly rattled off cities that came to mind. I had asked them, ‘Where did the largest civil rights protest of the 1960s take place?’ Their answers, building off the traditional civil rights narrative they had learned in elementary and middle school, mostly consisted of Southern cities. They were wrong. The real answer is New York City, where most of my students were born and raised…

“The real Civil Rights Movement was not just about tearing down legal barriers but about economic inequality, police brutality, and access to quality education and healthcare. This movement was national in scope, led by young people, and confronted segregation and racism in both the North and the South. In many ways, this movement was unsuccessful in places like New York City, leading to a deepening of some aspects of structural racism and segregation that exist to this day. The real history of the Civil Rights Movement, therefore, is not simply a narrative of success. It’s a narrative that helps us understand today’s institutional racism, because many aspects of racial injustice that the Civil Rights Movement fought against were never remedied.”

Segregation in NYC

This was an issue of redlining, which created inequitable schools. “By 1964, frustrations with the poor education Black and Puerto Rican students were receiving in New York led civil rights leaders to call for a one-day boycott of all schools. In the 10 years between the Brown decision and the boycott, segregation in New York City schools had quadrupled.

“Though the boycott was a huge success — nearly half of all students in New York City stayed home that day — internal tensions within the coalition that had pulled it off led to its collapse in the following months.

The New York Times editorialized against the action, titled “A Boycott Solves Nothing.” The piece “condemned the ‘reckless’ civil rights leaders who are ‘hellbent on staging’ a ‘violent, illegal,’ ‘utterly unreasonable and unjustified’ boycott, despite the school board’s well-meaning attempts to integrate schools,” even though the action was none of the above.

The poetry section of the post

The beginning of Let America Be America Again – Langston Hughes (1901 –1967). the whole thing is here

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

1977 versus 1978

Proctors

When I noted that I could remember specific years in my past, someone wanted to know how. As it pertains to 1977 versus 1978, it was easy. The first year was terrible, and the second year was pretty great. Not that 1977 was ALL bad.

I should start with the autumn of 1976. Ostensibly, I had graduated from SUNY New Paltz. By that, I mean I had enough credits to graduate, but I still had a course I was supposed to finish.

The Financial Council, the student government entity, hired me to sell concert tickets. While it was fun, and I got to attend some concerts for free, it didn’t pay enough to live on.

So, I must have called my parents in Charlotte, NC, and asked if I could live with them for a bit. I don’t remember the conversation, but I ended up there. My father had only moved down there in the spring of 1974, and my mom and baby sister in the autumn of that year. In January 1975, my other sister and I kidnapped our maternal grandmother and brought her to Queen City as well. So, my family didn’t have a lot of history there.

I’d help my parents sell costume jewelry. For many reasons, I hated it, except for the Kansas incident.

The big hassle about the city was that it was extremely difficult to get around. Most of the buses routed through the intersection of Trade and Tryon. If you wanted to go from Miami to NYC or LA to Seattle, imagine going via St.Louis. I did go to the library and saw the movie Gaslight, which was a small highlight. My family also watched the miniseries Roots, except we missed the first half hour of the penultimate night.

Skyscrapers and everything

By May 1977, I’d made my way to the apartment of my sister Leslie and her then-husband Eric in Jackson Heights, Queens. At least I had a semblance of a job: selling renewals of TV Guide magazines and the annuals of the Encyclopedia Americana or Brittanica.

I knew how to get around the Big Apple. Five days a week, I took the #7 train to the E train to Manhattan and back.

It wasn’t all bad. I met my friend Deborah, whose wedding I attended in May 2023 in France.

But the place was a bit unsettling. It was the NYC of the Bronx Zoo and the Son of Sam. Right before I left, I voted for Mario Cuomo for mayor over Ed Koch in the Democratic primary. Of course, the incumbent Koch won.

Back to the Paltz

I left there to go to my old college town. Crashing on my friend Lynn’s sofa, I tutored freshmen taking political science courses. They didn’t understand the three parts of the federal government; their real shortcomings were that they didn’t bother to read the books.

While I got to hang out with some old friends and met a new friend, Judy, I wasn’t getting enough hours.

The Capital District

I migrated up the Thruway to Schenectady, staying with Uthaclena and his then-wife. After Christmas, she suggested I apply for a job as a teller at Albany Savings Bank in downtown Albany. It seemed to be in my skill set, so I did. At the beginning of February, I got the job. However, I knew I would not love this career, even during the training process conducted by an excellent teller but a subpar instructor.

It turned out that Pam, the Innovative Studies coordinator at New Paltz, had also migrated north. Her beau, Paul, was in charge of a program operated by the Schenectady Arts Council, funded by federal grant money. I would be the bookkeeper. Moreover, I would make $8,200 per year, far more than the six grand I would be making at ASB; I had more money in my drawer at the beginning of the day than I was making annually. It became an easy decision when I spent an hour trying (and failing) to find a nickel shortfall in my drawer.

I started working at the Schenectady Arts Council. Immediately, my primary task was to contact businesses to see if they’d like to advertise for an event designed to help renovate Proctors Theatre. This old vaudeville venue had seen better days.

I also ran a biweekly Artisans Arcade; sang with Susan, the secretary, at nursing homes; was a partner with Darlene, the choreographer, when she taught dance to school kids; and served as the acting director when Paul went on vacation. I generally loved the job.

Although the funding suddenly disappeared on January 23, 1979, and it was greatly disappointing, it got me to where I needed to be.

My friend Deborah

1977 in NYCNY

1977 was primarily annus horribilis for me. Yet it was also the year I met my friend Deborah.

I was crashing at my sister Leslie and her then-husband’s Jackson Heights, Queens, NYC apartment. My job, such as it was, involved making telephone calls to get people to buy stuff. They were to resubscribe to TV Guide at a higher price than they would spend by purchasing it off the newsstand. And we collectively were pretty successful at it.

I also got people to buy the Annual updates for an encyclopedia, though I no longer remember which one. (Geek self-reveal: my parents bought the updates to our Encyclopedia Americana, and I read them when they arrived.) Other people sold Bulwark fitness gear.

I worked from six p.m. until midnight, never calling after nine p.m. in the locale I was calling. It was five days a week, so I had much free time.

I became friendly with a co-worker named Michael. Sometimes, we’d go down to Greenwich Village and hang out at the clubs or sometimes in a park.

I don’t remember where or how, but Michael met a young woman named Deborah. He was instantly smitten. They went out for half a minute before she broke up with him. Somehow, Deborah and I managed to become friends.

After I moved upstate – New Paltz, Schenectady, then Albany – we wrote or called each other. When I came to the City, I’d crash at her place.

Then she moved to Japan. I was a mediocre correspondent, and we lost touch. But through Facebook, we reconnected.

In-person

I told the story here about how I got some found money in 2018. Deborah was visiting friends in Connecticut. She drove to Poughkeepsie, and I took a train there. We chatted for about 90 minutes, then returned from whence we came.

In the last few months, I got to plan to see her again, longer than an hour and a half. That’s for another day, as I needed to tell THIS story to tell the NEXT one.