Robert Rosen

I've been reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers, a book about activists who try to save giant redwoods and Douglas firs, some more than a thousand years old, from logging companies determined to clear-cut entire forests. The book got me thinking about ancient trees, and the other day, as I was walking around Washington Square Park, I noticed that some of the trees looked like they'd been there a long time, maybe since the Civil War. "What's the oldest tree in Washington Square Park?" I asked Google. The answer surprised me.

 

In the northwest corner of the park is an enormous English elm, planted, according to some sources, in 1679, soon after the British took possession of New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York. The area was farmland surrounded by a marsh. Minetta Creek flowed down what would one day become Minetta Lane and Minetta Street.

 

The tree, 344 years old and 133 feet tall, is the oldest living thing in Manhattan. Its roots are thought to reach halfway across the park. Since nothing can live that long and be that big without having a legend attached to it, the English elm is also known as "The Hanging Elm," though there's no official record of anyone having been hanged from it. People were hanged from a gallows erected near the current location of the park's fountain and buried in the potter's field that's now the eastern two-thirds of the park. More than 20,000 bodies still lie underneath Washington Square, many of them victims of the yellow-fever epidemics that ravaged the city in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The elm has seen a lot.

 

I approached the northwest corner of the park looking for the tree. There was no mistaking it. With a trunk almost six feet in diameter, it dwarfs the surrounding trees. The elm seems to call out, "I'm the tree." I've walked by it a thousand times and wondered how I never noticed it before. I tried to take a picture of the entire tree but couldn't fit it all into the frame, not even close. So I settled for a photo of the bottom part of the trunk, which best communicates the enormity of an old English elm that will probably outlast me and you, too.

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We were sitting in a bar talking about air shafts. My friend Andrea was with her niece, Mia, who was visiting from Florida. Mia had wanted to go to the Tenement Museum, on the Lower East Side, admission $30. Andrea refused to pay $30 to look at a curated slum.

 

"Give me 30 bucks," I said to Mia. "I'll show you a shabby apartment."

 

The conversation then turned to defining what, exactly, makes a building a tenement. Andrea suggested a number of features distinctive to certain New York City apartments: rooms without windows, bathtub in kitchen, shared toilet in a water closet in the hallway, and windows looking out on an air shaft, often with garbage piled up at the bottom.

 

My wife, Mary Lyn, who's from Missouri and has never lived in a tenement, wasn't sure what an air shaft was. So Andrea and I endeavored to explain that in the early 20th century, New York City building codes demanded that apartments have at least one window, and that the solution to building cheap housing that had at least one window in every apartment was to place an air shaft—an empty verticle space—in the middle of the building. That way, interior apartments looked out on an air shaft, the other interior apartments often so close the tenants could reach out the window and shake hands with their neighbors as they inhaled the garbage fumes wafting up from below.

 

I pointed out that sometime in the 1950s, a builder came up with the insidious idea that kitchens and bathrooms don't need windows; vents would suffice. The idea caught on, and if you've spent any time in New York City, you've probably noticed how common this is, even in modern luxury buildings.

 

All this talk got me thinking about the apartment I lived in when I was a kid—the one I describe in detail in A Brooklyn Memoir. That building wasn't a tenement, but it was pretty rundown, though it did have a window in every room, including the kitchen and bathroom. What I didn't describe in the book was the way the kitchen and bathroom windows looked out on a space in the middle of the building that was too small to be called a courtyard but was bigger than an air shaft and served the same purpose. Every so often, a man with an accordian wandered into this space to sing Italian songs. People threw money at him, an occasional dollar bill floating down. From our third-floor kitchen window, I'd try to hit him in the head with pennies until my mother walked into the room and screamed, "Stop throwing money out the window!"

 

Should there be a future edition of A Brooklyn Memoir, I will include this scene.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Bob Wilson and Don Jeffries are prolific podcasters (both individually and together), and I've been a guest on a few of their shows, including Don't Pass Me By and The Donald Jeffries Show. They liked what I had to say about the Beatles and asked me to answer a few questions for their new book, From Strawberry Fields to Abbey Road (BearManor Media).

 

The subject of the book is a question that's been kicking around since 1966 and found new life among the multitude of conspiracy theories thriving on the Internet: Is Paul McCartney dead and was he replaced by a lookalike?

 

Most sane people will agree that Paul is very much alive and living the good life of a talented, aging billionaire (as I said in response to one of the questions). But if you were around when the Beatles were together, you were probably aware of the so-called "clues" on their album covers and on the recordings themselves that indicated Paul was dead.

 

There are a wealth of such clues on Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, and the White Album (The Beatles), and it was fun to seek them out and analyze them, as my friends and I did at the time. Even then we didn't believe Paul was dead; we thought the Beatles were playing a game. The title of this post, "Turn Me on Dead Man," is a clue from the White Album. If you spin John Lennon's avant-garde sound pastiche "Revolution 9" backwards, every time you spin through "number 9," it sounds like "Turn me on dead man."

 

The clues have been analyzed to death over the years. Perhaps the most bizarre analysis can be found in a book titled The Lennon Prophesy. The author, Joseph Niezgoda, who believes Lennon sold his soul to the devil, reinterprets all the "Paul is dead" clues as predictions of Lennon's death.

 

Wilson and Jeffries go in a completely different and far more entertaining direction: They interviewed an eclectic group of celebrities, writers, and musicians, all of whom had a Beatles connection, and asked them for their thoughts on the clues. They include Richard Belzer, the late actor and comedian; Richie Furay, co-founder of Buffalo Springfield; actress Sally Kirkland; Victoria Jackson, from SNL; Susan Olsen, from The Brady Bunch; Steve Boone, bassist for the Lovin' Spoonful; Jon Provost, who played Timmy on Lassie; Bruce Spizer, who's written many Beatle books; Fred LaBour, a writer and musician who's credited with popularizing the Paul-is-dead rumor... and me. (Note to Jon Provost: Are you sure "Martha My Dear" isn't Lassie's favorite Beatle song? It's about Paul's sheepdog.)

 

So, if you'd like to lose yourself for a few amusing hours in a rumor that has as much staying power as the Beatles themselves, allow me to clue you in to From Strawberry Fields to Abbey Road.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

 

On days like this, when I prefer to not think too much about the need (obligation?) to write something substantial about the four days Mary Lyn Maiscott and I spent in Uvalde, Texas, on the first anniversary of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, I find it helpful to look at the whimsical creature known as Ruby Leggs, created by my late friend Sonja Wagner. So I plucked another Ruby from my Sonjabox. In this one, titled As I See It, Ruby has slipped out of her signature high heels and is having a smoke in her bedroom by an open window that looks out on West 37th Street, which is where Sonja lived for 46 years. Note Ruby's collection of shoes in the shoe rack next to the window, her cat occupying one of the shelves.

 

What I find most amusing about this Ruby are the black-and-white studies for the cat. It's as if she had a spiky punk hairdo and her tail were an arm of saguaro cactus (kind of like my own cat, Oiseau).

 

I hope this hit of Ruby has improved your outlook on a day in New York City where the air isn't fit to breathe and the sky is so hazy from wildfires burning in Canada that the sun looks like the moon.

 

If you want to read more about Sonja and her art, please see my tribute, "The Life of Sonja," in The Village Voice.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.