01/12/2024
From the heart and mind of Izzy Young… An introspective walk around NYC in July 1962, along with the thoughts, observations, and memories it provokes within him. The original typed manuscript can be viewed in the pictures of the post. Enjoy!
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Notes on leaving the Embassy Theatre on 42nd St. at 5:20pm, on Tuesday July 2, 1962. I was reflective on leaving the theatre but I was immediately beset by the light of the street and the activity of the people. I walked as in a dream, all my senses alive. I walked past the orange juice stand where I had fresh orange juice before the show started. I passed the hat stand where the guy was sewing names free on cheap hats for tourists. I crossed the street between the two flowing streets of traffic downtown, with the sounds all around me. I was in a daze but all awake waiting for a break to cross to the other side of Broadway. Suddenly the sun hit me from behind the Paramount Building where I least expected it. People rushing all about. The headline in the morning paper blurting out "Red Superspy Caught", along with the later headlines of JFK meeting the Pope. On 42nd st. I noticed the river, the Hudson river, for the first time, though I was there a thousand times. Ferma e chiara, just like in In the poem by Pavese. And into Grants for a frankfurter. How many· people I had taken there, but now remembering one, one from the high school Music and Art. She wanted me to take her to Sardi’s. So I took her to Grants. She was dressed right out of the New Yorker. Ske was going to be an Opera Star. She was going to sing at La Scala. The frankfurter man shoved a frank at me and a nickel change. I was going to get a drink and I remembered the egg cream around the corner, the best, the most homemade egg cream in nyc, but that girl from Music and Art came back to me. She had a lover in South America, a banker, and he left her. She even came to me to help her get started in folkmusic. You can read all about her in my address book and how she committed su***de by hanging, two years ago. The egg cream is now fifteen cents, but there is a large one for three cents more and that is what I got. And a bar of sesame seeds for I am off chocolate candies and such. The rush for eggcreams. I began to realize that these people were rushing for they were through working. All with their papers ready to absorb more history that had passed them while they were working. A moment of respite, an egg cream. I once took Bob, with crutches, by cab to this same place for an egg cream. I walked on down Seventh Avenue. An old man sat in the street protected by building machinery. Tired. An old woolen cap, torn, on his head. Three carton, of his belongings by his side. Yes, the world was too much for him… Too much belongings and he stopped by the temporary wreckage 'building-for-the-future' leaves all around NYC these days. I just saw a movie, thought out, planned to show the outsides of a man's life and I could do the same in a half hour or less for I didn't know how much longer I would take the walk. Now the headlines were even bigger…. POPE PRAYS OR INTEGRATION….A Spanish woman telling a Jewish woman outside of a garment center building that she could get along with anyone in the world. The Metropolitan Opera House sporting a huge sign "What's new in fabrics?" and which dwarfed a much smaller sign asking you to read the Opera News, The newspaper stands crowded. The garment center buildings engorging themselves of Jewish-Americans and some Puerto Ricans as yellow as the Jewish women are white. Into the fur district but not before an anonymous cart loomed up before me and finally betrayed the force of a negro pushing it forward. A colored sign in a window RAW DRESSED RUSSIAN LYNX and a hand printed sign below it CLOSED UP TO MONDAY, JULY 8th.
The homemade syntax amused me. And overhearing my last sentence in the garment district---"If I tell you something why do you always have to contradict me?" I crossed 34th St. that doesn't allow traffic to make turns from 8am to 8 pm. The first handmade sign on the downtown side announced that Mr. Phillips who used to work for Miss Haircut was now working HERE: and my first sign in Spanish A Qui se habla espanol, in an obviously Spanish diner with an open window to the public. I passed the place that sells foreign magazines for all I had left was 45 cents. Figuring a good magazine would be at least 50 cents. At 21st street I encountered a young girl in high heels, with a doll and a paper cup of ice in her hands. On 18th Street I stopped by an old Italian selling frankfurters, why, I don't know, it was the day. Some Spanish fellows were having franks with onions. He said "When will it ever end" and I ordered a frank with sauerkraut. It was the last one and he smiled and drained the water cabinet with the sodas in it. Said 'sorry' to the fellow after me and started to clean up, and off I walked but not before I saw a serious fellow pass by with a book, Tropic of Cancer, and reading it seriously on such a hot day, and wearing a jacket. I saw him again in front of Barneys, “the only store of its kind in New York!” I bought a suit there when I was a kid and returned it. I said it was too small, or at least my mother did, and I puffed out my chest to show it was too small and he said I surely didn't stand like that normally and I kept my chest out the required length of time. On 16th St., chalked on a wall, was the message "I love, I love Alberto" the first time I had ever seen a Spanish name in such a message and the first time I had seen the message elongated. One Fifteenth St., surrounded by factories and workplaces, a new building is almost up, the Vermeer, and the sign says Greenwich Village but everyone knows that the Village stops at 14th St. I cross 14th St and almost collide with three, beautiful young girls, just like the ones I always fall in love with. Aha, I am back in my Village. I will soon meet people I know. A new building up on McCarthy Square. I heard Governor Lehman speak there two years ago, five years ago, in an apartment a half block away, l tried to have sexual relations with a girl at the end of a party after a concert I. presented earlier that night. There were ten people sleeping except me and this girl,,,,later she said that I ((.....)) like a horse…and into Waverly Place, where by turns Poe and Millay lived. Where I sat in on a Peace Meeting. Where I started a walk around NYC with a Philippine girl but the walk didn't end the way walks around NYC usually do, and where two months ago I met my old girl friend on the way to the bank and I helped her water flowers for three hours in her friends apt. I've had more fun with her since she married than when we lived together on 109 Waverly Place, under her name, where I often visited after everyone else had left. And where I used to live was this girl, consciously, reading the back liner notes of Bob Dylan's new album. I thought that odd for I was displaying his record all over my window. Why just yesterday Bob told me that he was devoting a chapter to me in his new book and so that means I have to keep the store going until at least the book comes out to keep the image intact for I don’t even know what it is. And hurriedly to the store where a photographer was anxiously waiting for me to photograph me drinking a martini and the photo would appear in Time Magazine, but I wanted to get to the typewriter and Lanny wanted to leave and now I am alone by the typewriter. Lou Gottlieb, of the Limeliters, walked in and told me he had nothing to do for two days and reproached me for not visiting them, especially since it was free, at the Basin Street East. I asked if he would like to take a walk around NYC tonight, it is about 95 degrees even now. Sure; first he will see the Premise and then he'll come around. I don’t know why I asked him but I did and I hope he comes for it will be another great walk around NYC and I see it clearly now. ANYTIME I walk around NYC it is like a story for I know the city inside out and every street has memories for me to impart meaning to my every step •••••••••••• Now all I need to do is to love someone.
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The above account was written, truly enough, in 1962, and promptly 'lost' as so many other writings of mine. Written for the moment it has withstood time, so to speak, and I find it in a bookcase, or under other papers, every five years or so. When I discovered it last I tried to improve it with my IBM Selectric, and even that, luckily, seems as out of date, now, as the original typescript. I have decided not to change the original, or to retype it with my up-to-date computer. The typewritten account has an air of immediacy that seems charming and truthful 35 years later.
Only 100 copies of this were printed in April 1997, to be rapidly given out to my few friends, who in one way or another like and don't like my writings.
Izzy Young, Folklore Centrum; Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 2, 118 50 Stockholm, Sweden. Tel/ Fax +468 643 46 27
Second Edition: 100 copies: August 1999: I cannot improve on the introduction above: same address.
Israel G. Young
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