NYC Christmas images

Chestnuts roasting in the food cart on the southeast corner of 43rd Street and 6th Avenue. Not quite on an open fire, but with the same aroma many people associate with the Christmas holidays.

A child in a stroller excitedly points to an object above the southwest corner of 44th Street and 5th Avenue. The woman pushing him acknowledges his words, saying with a foreign accent, "Clock. Yes, clock!"

People, some of them dressed up and walking quickly, others dressed down and moving slowly, hold bags of gifts.

Men greet each other with handshakes and begin talking. Women hug good-bye after a meal.

A guy steps out of a taxi in front of the Met Life Building on 45th Street and squeezes a $5 bill into the red bucket next to a Salvation Army worker who breaks the rhythm of his bells only for a second to say "Thank you." A few feet away, a newspaper vendor sits quietly, with few customers.

On 5th Avenue near 48th Street, a man walks past a deformed woman sitting on the sidewalk, then turns around to give her money. Several blocks uptown, a guy pulls out a pack of chips from a lunch bag and gives it to a beggar.

Two New York Police Department officers, one a man the other a woman, smile while posing for pictures with tourists, the Times Square crowd behind them.

Digital cameras capture image after image of the bright lights of Times Square, the big tree at Rockefeller Center, the marquee outside Radio City Music Hall, the skaters at Bryant Park, the elegant white lights of the Chrysler Building and the colorful lighting on the Empire State Building.

Sometimes, though, it's minds that capture images of Christmas in New York City and digitizes them in words.

Santacon comes to town

The timing could not have been more ironic. On Friday night, Yes, Virgina, an animated Christmas special set in New York in 1897, aired on network television. On Saturday, Santacon, an excuse for as many as 1400 characters in Santa Claus suits to party, played out across New York City’s bars and streets.

I realized something strange was afoot when I saw a tall guy dressed like Santa Claus walking in Penn Station. He looked like he could stuff a bag of toys down a chimney just by standing on the tips of his toes. Instead, he dutifully purchased a ticket back to Long Island, presumably en route to the North Pole where elves and reindeer are finalizing preparations for another Christmas Eve.

Moments later, I saw groups of red-suited white-bearded people on subway cars. Sightings of Santas, some of them women with very short skirts under their short red and white coats, continued on the East Side in the early evening. Riding a cab along Second Avenue hours later, I saw groups of Santa Claus lookalikes hanging outside a number of bars.

According to its web site, the New York City Santacon event “is a non-denominational, non-commercial, non-political and non-sensical Santa Claus convention that occurs once a year for absolutely no reason.” There was some revelry around town, for sure, but no Santa arrests, according to a newspaper report. A tweet stated, though, that police prevented Santas from occupying the red bleachers in Times Square, saying, “You can’t stay here.”

Santa is not Superman, however, and some of the red-suited characters I saw at Penn Station as midnight approached seemed ready to turn into pumpkins. They sat on the floor, glazed eyes half-shut, slumped by their companions, as if they were thinking, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

If an 8-year-old child witnessed the Santacon spectacle, what would they say? If a newspaper editor was challenged by a child to explain whether Santa Claus is real, what would they write? “Yes, Virginia, there is a…Santacon.”

New Orleans: characters welcome

There are probably more characters per capita in New Orleans than any other American city, even New York. With almost a third of its population gone since the devastation from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans’ characters seem more visible these days. This appears to further add to the unique character of this special American city.

There was the man with the full white beard, sunglasses, red hat, Hawaiian shirt, red shorts, and red hi-top shoes who slowly but merrily made his way up Bourbon Street one evening, not to be outdone by another overweight man who wore nothing more than a genie- or showgirl-type costume while dancing to recorded music a few blocks away on Bourbon Street.

Then there was Ann, who led a demonstration at the New Orleans School of Cooking while entertaining tourists with her take on the city’s history and quirks, including accents of inhabitants like the woman behind the desk at Le Richelieu, who sounded if she spent a lot of time in both Louisiana and Brooklyn.

Other interesting workers included a tour bus driver, who remarked, “It’s a long way from New Jersey. Y’all here on that witness protection program?” The swamp tour guide discussed changes on the bayou before and after Katrina, and said, “Bubba Gump is the only New Orleans restaurant that doesn’t serve gulf shrimp.” There was the highly educated and very talkative waitress at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, and the warm and cheery man at the entrance to Pat O’Brien’s with a name tag that appropriately read “Love.”

Of course, there were many and varied entertainers in Jackson Square and on Bourbon and Royal Streets, including a violin and guitar duo who segued seamlessly from Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved” to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven.” The next day, they were joined by a vocalist on “Summertime.” Even some of the many young people walking around with pit bulls stopped to listen.

All kinds of interesting men seem to spend time on the streets, from the very kind old gentleman in the Garden District who stopped to talk with two middle-age tourists and voluntarily pointed out the Manning family home, to the bicyclist riding down Chartres Street one night cheerily singing “Don’t know much about history…” to Heath, the word busker on Frenchmen Street who recited the following poem he wrote on a manual typewriter in less than 15 minutes:

DISNEYLAND FOR ADULTS

The Swamp tour ran into
The haunted vampire tour
Its bus lateral, sidewalk careening
Into the enebriated crowd

blindly following
some gothic guy
his red, satin cloak
covering his pimply face
as plastic, hand grenade containers
explode into air
and the loudspeaker on the bus
shouts out
“To the left, how about them vampire,
swamp gators?”

People stare, looking through –
Steamly cracked windows
for viewers of the cypress swamp.

New Orleans remains a city with many characters, and a lot of character. It’s been that way for almost 300 years, through French rule, Spanish rule, French control again and, after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, under US control. Through all the change and turmoil over the years, its music, food, drink and architecture have remained unique among American cities. So has its diverse mix of people, who continue to give the city its own very special character.

To see more photos of the people and places Charley saw while on vacation in New Orleans recently, click the link below.

Kodak Gallery: Charles's Gallery

The downtown edge

It's true: lower Manhattan has a different vibe, a different energy and edge, compared to midtown. I tasted it first-hand while spending a few days last week working, eating, sleeping and walking around Soho, Chinatown and Little Italy, by Tribeca.

Walking down Canal Street, which hasn't seemed to change at all over the years, I was asked more than once about my interest in buying a Rolex watch. I stopped to ask a cop if the distinct structure a few blocks south was the municipal building. Seemingly unsure, she said it was "down there a few blocks." As I walked across a courtyard full of cars at the Manhattan Detention Center, a man walked out of a building and into the waiting arms of a woman who seemed thrilled to see him.

Back on Canal Street, I walked past a seafood store with its front open to the sidewalk, from where all kinds of people, young, old, middle age; black, white, yellow; men, women, undetermined; seemed determined to find the best value among all kinds of sea fare, some of which looked more appetizing than others.

Continuing past groups of tourists and other out-of-towners, I made my way down Mulberry Street and into what remains of Little Italy, which certainly seems smaller than it was a generation or two ago. By Grand Street, a white-haired man in a white t-shirt lowered and dangled a pink shopping bag on a string from the second floor window of an old apartment building. He beckoned a lady below to "get it." After protesting loudly, she eventually took something from inside the bag and entered the building. Minutes later, the guy in the t-shirt was still by his window, now shut, seeming to stare at blank space between his apartment and the street below.

A woman in a white Mercedes-Benz SL 500 pulled into a parking spot that a friend on the sidewalk seemed to somehow save for her. Down the street, two ladies made their way toward Canal Street slowly, almost aimlessly, passing Italian restaurants and various stores. "Everything in the store is under $10; bags, scarves," a man on the sidewalk told them. They paused, and walked on. For some reason, I began to think of a book I read more than once as a child, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss and Robert Carington - published in 1937, and still seeming to capture the neighborhood's fantasies.

Back on Canal Street, a young inter-racial couple walked leisurely, sharing some laughs. "You can't bite your nails," she said. "Why?" he asked. "Because I can't," she responded. Later that evening, on the sidewalk outside a Soho post office at Prince and Greene Streets, I spotted a tribute to Steve Jobs that can only be described as...very Soho, or downtown. The late Apple leader probably would've liked it. A middle-age guy who spends a lot of time in midtown photographed it and posted it on Twitter.

Elsewhere in Soho, the neighborhood's boutiques and other stores closed for the evening, smokers were hanging outside clubs. A hotel set up ropes outside its front doors in anticipation of a late night crowd trying to get into its bar. Two young professional ladies walked out, tapped furiously on their BlackBerrys, and jumped into a taxi for some dancing at another downtown spot.

If you look beyond technology, there's probably little that's changed in the vibe and energy of lower Manhattan during the past 100-200 years. According to historians, it's always had an edge, an edge that kept pushing the city's initial waves of elites north to midtown and beyond, to the orderliness of the grid designed by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811. Robert Moses threatened the neighborhood's edge with the Lower Manhattan Expressway over a century later, but the highway was never built, ensuring Soho and other neighborhoods below the grid were more than an area to drive quickly through. That was a good thing, because there are a lot of interesting things to stop and see in downtown.

“Irene, you were such an annoyance and inconvenience”

Hurricane Irene was kinder to me than it was to many people in the New Jersey/New York area. I didn’t sustain any damage or flooding. It just resulted in some annoyances and inconveniences.

Fearing that strong winds or a tornado might tear off the roof and blow out some windows, my wife and I decided to sleep in our living room rather than our bedroom Saturday night. When the power went out at 2:25 Sunday morning, our home’s security system began beeping annoyingly every half hour or so, ending any hope we had of a decent night’s sleep. We learned hours later the system’s backup battery was dead, so I had to open the control box with a screwdriver and disconnect the expired battery to stop the relentless beeping. Peace…for a little while.

Perhaps jealous at the attention the security system received, a smoke detector in the master bedroom decided to start beeping every few seconds. Of course, it was the only smoke detector we couldn’t reach with one of our ladders. After listening to it all of Sunday, hoping unsuccessfully it would wear itself out, my sons and I walked down the street to borrow a neighbor’s tall ladder. With the aid of a flashlight, we were able to replace the dead backup battery and stop its incessant chirping -- and, get a fair night’s sleep.

Of course, having no power in the house meant we had no working lights, microwave, toaster, home entertainment system, telephone, TV or – gasp – internet connection. Fortunately, since our cars worked, one of my sons and I were able to drive to a café that hadn’t lost power and get some work done while recharging our batteries (figuratively and literally).

Before leaving, realizing food in our refrigerators was on the verge of going bad, I decided to barbecue chicken on our outdoor grill. Why not – isn’t that a good post-hurricane breakfast in suburban New Jersey? One of my sons appreciated it that morning, and the rest of our family did for the rest of the week, until we just got plain tired of it and swore off eating chicken again any time soon.

Eventually, the remaining contents of our refrigerators had to be put in the garbage. Truthfully, some of it already belonged there. But, it was annoying to throw away yogurt, hummus, frozen vegetables and meats, including a beef loin butt tender marked at $50.77. I guess we should be grateful that our town had a special garbage pickup for spoiled food a few days later.

By the time power returned to our home at 3:15 AM Wednesday, our family gained a new appreciation for the value of sunlight and candles to our ancestors. We discovered how challenging it is to shower in darkness and even how difficult it is to read by candlelight. It was nice sitting around and talking to each other without electronic distractions for a while, but…enough is enough – we went to bed early every evening. Let people have the power, already!

Seeing the destruction and erosion it caused in parts of the Jersey Shore a few days later, I’m grateful Hurricane Irene was just an annoyance and inconvenience in my Mercer County neighborhood. I’ll file it away among my life experiences, alongside the November 9, 1965 blackout, which is the only time I recall seeing candles lit in my family’s New York City apartment. If I don’t have another experience like Irene for another 45 years, though, that will be just fine.

Bruce, the boss

Bruce Keenan, my boss when I was a part-time sportswriter at The Herald-News and completing my studies at Seton Hall University, was one of the most fascinating characters I’ve met in my life.

His first words to me, when I reported to work one winter evening in 1976 and introduced myself to him as he sat with a toothpick in his mouth and a yardstick protruding from the back of his shirt, were simple and direct: “Sit down.”

Yet, there was little simple about Bruce, I learned during my two years at the Passaic, NJ daily newspaper.

He was only in his mid-30s at the time, but he looked 15-20 years older despite not seeming to have a hard life. If anything, he was hard on life.

Bruce grew up in East Orange, NJ at a time when it changed from a largely white middle-class Newark suburb to mostly a community of African-Americans, whom he sometimes referred to as “rug heads.” He played basketball at Clifford J. Scott High School and went on to Bethany College, where he was as a sports editor for the Class of 1964 yearbook. After finishing military service (something he never talked about), he joined The Herald-News and established his credentials as a sportswriter chronicling the New York Mets miracle run to a World Series title in 1969.

By the time I joined The Herald-News in 1976, Bruce was editing the work of the newspaper’s sportswriters and collaborating with the backroom typesetters on the sports section’s layout. The yardstick he kept with him at all times, along with the lined papers that sat on his desk and the leather athletic shoes he wore on his feet, helped him accomplish that. The booze he liked to drink too often, unfortunately, did not.

When Bruce had one or two too many drinks, sometimes on dinner break when he was scheduled to work late, sometimes before he even got to the office, his staff would typically cover for him. One of the senior members would ensure the edits and layouts were properly done. The rest of us would turn it up a notch so that we could go home on time and with the sports section in good shape. If necessary, one of us would drive him home. It was my first lesson on the importance of taking good care of your boss.

Fortunately, Bruce usually took his job seriously and came to the office – almost always by foot – sober. He would often keep himself away from his local favorite bar (conveniently located halfway between his office and home) by bringing in a salad – “rabbit food,” he called it. After all the sports articles had been written, accounted for in the page layouts, and turned over to the typesetters, he would dismiss us and, shortly afterwards, unless he was “on the wagon,” finish his night by stopping at the bar on his way home.

To some, Bruce was a lot like Oscar Madison, the divorced sportswriter half of The Odd Couple. Bruce never married, though. And, he was a lot more interesting than the Oscar Madison character portrayed on the stage and screen.

For one thing, Bruce was not very predictable. Sometimes he was chatty and sociable and easily amused. Other times he was quiet and brooding.

He liked Bob Dylan, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, and would sometimes blurt out a lyric from one of their songs. He said he disliked punk rock. When I went with him to CBGB in New York City one night, however, he felt completely in his element – and had a better time there a few months later during my farewell outing than most of the other, younger sportswriters.

Bruce could be generous, taking the staff out to dinner occasionally, although he basically was very thrifty and Spartan himself. He disliked cheapskates, referring to them as “five-and-dimers.”

He once moved out of his Clifton apartment when the landlord asked him to paint it. “I said ‘no,’” Bruce explained. “I’m not Picasso.”

Bruce appeared to have few friends outside of his favorite bar, but always seemed pleased by visits to the office from the Fairleigh Dickinson University sports information director, a former Herald-News sportswriter who a few years later would become the publicist of the New York Mets. Not surprisingly, the annual FDU sports banquet was Bruce’s favorite social event.

The only person Bruce seemed to spend any time with outside the office or bar was his mom (he never mentioned his father). Driving to visit her in East Orange appeared the only reason he had a car, a non-descript Renault that, like Bruce, seemed older than its years. To his credit, Bruce understood the perils of drinking and driving better than most contemporaries, and his car usually stayed parked in The Herald-News lot on Main Avenue while he walked to and from work.

I last saw Bruce about a dozen years after leaving The Herald-News, while running errands in downtown Clifton. He looked terrible, and the appearance of this big 50-year-old man going on 75 nearly frightened my young son.

It seemed all the sportswriters from my days at The Herald-News lost touch with Bruce as we moved on with our careers, and that was probably okay with him. Bruce seemed just fine with being left alone. He began his rest in peace on July 26, 1996, four months after turning 54.

I always felt one of my rewards for working at The Herald-News was having a boss like Bruce. I realized early in my career there are lessons about life, good and bad, that can’t necessarily be learned from written or spoken words but, rather, by simple observation and reflection. Perhaps that’s why Bruce told me to sit down when we first met.

The sportswriters

I’ve had the fortune of being in the right place at the right time during much of my life, especially in my professional career. This was never more true than the two years I spent working part-time as a sportswriter for The Herald-News in Passaic, NJ, while finishing my studies at Seton Hall University.

It was a time of technological transition in the newspaper industry. When I began at The Herald-News, articles were still composed on typewriters. By the time I left, we were inputting our stories on computer-like machines called video display terminals, or “tubes” as we called them.

During my time there, The Herald-News changed from a traditional broadsheet format, complete with an American flag in a top corner, to a radical easier-to-read horizontal-format design with lots of green color. Unlike computer technology, however, this change didn’t prove beneficial, and the newspaper reverted to a more traditional layout before merging with The News of Paterson in 1987 and, eventually, The Record of Bergen County.

Technology and design changes aside, what made my timing particularly good at “the product,” as we called it, was the interesting and gifted array of staffers I had the good fortune of working with. To an aspiring journalist, a paying gig at The Herald-News was a dream come true. The evening in January 1976 that I reported to work at the since-demolished Main Avenue office was one of the best in my life, despite a rather inauspicious start.

“Hi, I’m Charley Bruns,” I announced to my new boss as I held out my hand for him to shake. He looked up at me, tooth pick in his mouth and yardstick protruding from the back of his shirt, and replied, with some annoyance in his voice, “Sit down.” Fortunately, it got better when I proved that I belonged on his talented team.

Mike Moretti, a fellow Bloomfield resident and Seton Hall guy, recommended me to his bosses. A rising star and a cool cat among New Jersey sportswriters, Mike could make anything interesting to read. His written words had style, and years later he was described as “perhaps the most lovable sportswriter in the state” and, after a long career of contributing articles to The Star-Ledger about volleyball, bowling, track and field, girls lacrosse and sports memorabilia, “the utility man of the sportswriting set, the jack-of-all-trades.”

Equally talented and stylish with his written words was Hank Gola, on the verge of graduating Montclair State and launching a successful career which would land him at The Daily News of New York, where he covers the New York Giants and has been recognized as “by far and away the best golf writer of all the greater-NYC papers combined.”

When it came to sports knowledge, no one could top Jim Dente, who covered the New York Yankees when the Bronx Bombers of Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin regained the headlines and won a few championships. Jim’s probably working as hard as ever today as sports editor of The New Jersey Herald of Sussex County, and no doubt could still teach anyone more than a few things about sports and journalism.

Greg Schmalz also had an encyclopedic knowledge of sports, and would freely share it with a broadcaster-quality voice that years later helped him land assignments with ABC Radio. As The Herald-News reporter who travelled with New York Jets, Greg claimed to be pals with Joe Namath and even shared the legendary quarterback’s phone number, “212.555.1212,” with this gullible college kid.

When I started with The Herald-News, the biggest personality on the staff was Eric Mortenson, whose pen name was Kurt Ericson. A larger than life figure, Eric was the director of the Verona Recreation Center for 30 years while working part-time as a sportswriter.

Mark Everson and Jack Bell joined the sports department shortly after I began with The Herald-News. Mark’s baptism of fire was covering the New York Rangers, an assignment he took to so well that The New York Post hired him to do it for them years later. Today, he reports on the New Jersey Devils for the Post.

Jack had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin and, after a stint on the news desk, began covering the Cosmos with a knowledge of soccer that few American sportswriters could match. For the past 20 years, Jack has been a staff editor at The New York Times while continuing to write about soccer in blogs and columns.

Randy Lange and Pete Brophy also joined The Herald-News while I was there. Randy went on to cover the New York Jets for a dozen years, and today is editor-in-chief of newyorkjets.com as well as the team’s director of publications. I believe Pete, formerly The Press of Atlantic City digital editor, is now the newspaper’s local content editor.

Back in the day when women sportswriters were virtually unheard of, The Herald-News had Carol Sakowitz, who went on to write for various other newspapers and now may be the same Carol who is in Florida with The Charlotte Sun and Weekly Herald.

Two high school kids also launched their careers with The Herald-News during my time there. Barry Gramlich was a stylish teenager who went on to The Record of Bergen County, where he has been an editor and writer for 25 years. John Kobylt eventually found a niche in broadcasting and today is hugely successful in The John and Ken Show, a southern California program which is one of the most influential and listened to local talk radio shows in the United States.

Interestingly, the two college students who worked part-time in the sports department did not pursue sportswriting careers after graduating. While I used the wisdom gained from my experience at The Herald-News to launch a corporate communications career, Bill Mezzomo decided to go to Rutgers University School of Law and practice law in New Jersey. He is currently an associate with a Morristown law firm.

Not everyone who worked in The Herald-News sports department was a young stud, however. The eldest member of the staff was John Hayes, a former sportswriter with the Philadelphia Daily News. John was winding down his career in the mid-1970s and rarely had an assignment out of the office – but he was the only one of us guys who sported a goatee and an earring.

And then there was Bruce Keenan, our boss, The Boss before Bruce Springsteen laid claim to the title. He was the man who greeted me that January 1976 evening with a bit of indifference and skepticism. Bruce remains one of the most fascinating characters I’ve met in my life. Ah, but he’s the subject of another blog post.