New York in summer, ‘it’s a helluva town’

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Dante couldn’t have imagined New York City summers. Summers in Bay Ridge, my neighborhood, were hot; my tour in Baghdad came close, but couldn’t equal riding the 4^th Ave Local or Sea Beach Express into Manhattan. A sauna couldn’t outperform what the 4^th Avenue Local could put out when it came to heat. Satan would have found Hades cooler. Violating subway rules, passengers opened the end doors on the cars, ignoring the command “No Standing Between Cars.” Riding the subway in summer was capital punishment.

For kids, summer meant freedom from heat in upstate New York (anything above the city line was “Upstate”) or Breezy Point, “the Irish Riviera,” in Rockaway, unless you had to go to summer school. There was no A/C in city schools; you just sucked it up. Nothing like a glob of sweat plopping down on your algebra homework or wiping out your declension of amo, amas, amat in a sweltering classroom. Summer school wasn’t a chance to learn first-year Latin again; it was “Introduction to Purgatory 101”.

Neighborhood movie houses (they weren’t “theatres”) advertised COOL over the marquee in printed ice cycles overhanging “COOL”. You didn’t care what was showing; it was cool. Movies weren’t “film” or “cinema” either. If a “film” had won some foreign award, you knew it was a stinker (if Europeans want to find themselves, I wish they’d do it elsewhere). Bad and “Fellini” go together; there is no such thing as a “bad” Fellini movie, they all are. For the rest of us outside the movie house, it was misery. For our fathers, those sixty-dollar Haspel poplin or seersucker suits ($60 when I had a summer job at Morgan), whether from Brooks Brothers, Rogers Peat, or Browning, did the trick. It was Haspel out of New Orleans, where they knew hot.

My grandfather’s saloon was air-conditioned; the family’s two flats above weren’t. His “gin mill” (my grandmother called it that), along with the air conditioning, had a magnifier over the TV for the games from Ebbits Field (the Dodgers, Brooklyn’s alternate religion), the Polo Grounds (the Giants, or “Gints” in NYC speak), or Yankee Stadium (home of the devil himself). This was the fifties. Later, my grandmother had a window air conditioner in her living room above “the gin mill,” too small to do the job, but who knew about cubic inches? My mother finally got one, or two in the seventies, the last being a big one. Mom had said for years we didn’t need A/C because we had windows on four sides. At twenty-something, after the Army, I said, when you were growing up, most streets weren’t paved, apartment houses didn’t exist to block the ocean breezes, and trees were abundant. The neighborhood had changed since 1920; concrete, asphalt, and high rises did it. She relented. “Should have done it sooner,” she said, just like getting a dishwasher, I mumbled.

At least my first NYC job had A/C–Number 2 World Trade Center — as an administrative intern for Louis Lefkowitz, New York’s eternal attorney general. This guy was elected when I was in single digits. I rode the 4th Avenue Local from 95^th Street in Brooklyn (the beginning of the line) to Courtland Street, the WTC. Air-conditioned cars were new; unless in a hurry, passengers would wait until an A/C one came in. It was worth it not to climb up the stairs at your station dripping. At the office, one could, for a few hours at least, be comfortable, then it was back underground, and do it all over the next day.

Want to take a look at mid-century New York? Take a gander at Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch” or Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in “Bell, Book, and Candle.” In spite of all the discomfort, living in NYC in that era was magical. Leonard Bernstein summed it up in “On the Town”:

New York, New York, a heluva town
The Bronx is up, but the Battery’s down
The people ride in a hole in the ground
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!!

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William Layer

Lt. Colonel Civil Affairs, USAR (ret) served twenty-six years in the regular and reserve components of the US Army. He was civil military liaison for the 260th Military Police, DC National Guard, State Public Affairs Officer, Commander of the Public Affairs unit and a counter-drug intelligence analyst. Transferring to the 352 Civil Affairs Command as monuments and archives officer, he became the Command Public Affairs Officer in Iraq as well as liaison to local Iraqi leaders and acting Secretary to the General Staff. He was instrumental in recovering photographic artifacts of the Iraqi Royal family while in Baghdad. He was wounded in action in an ambush in Feb. 2004 for which he was awarded the Purple Heart.
In his civilian career he worked primarily in Army Public Affairs and for the Air Force as historian to the presidential wing in the early Reagan administration and later for Air Force Legislative Liaison covering congressional hearings and assisting in preparing testimony for senior leaders.
His essays and reviews have appeared in the scholarly and popular press including Asian Affairs and the Washington Times. He is co-author, with Ali Wahab, of The Iraqi Royal Family, a Collection of Photographs Recovered from The Ruins of the Zuhur Palace, 2004.
A native New Yorker, he holds a BA with honors in history from Findlay College (Ohio) and an MA in history from The Ohio State University. He is a graduate of the US Army Command & General Staff College and was graduated with distinction US Naval War College with a MA in National Security and Strategic Studies.