NYCHistory: New York on Film in Chronological Order.

Introduction.

After ninety days in lockdown, my imagination is naturally trying to focus on other people and places, constantly reminding myself that there is a world outside of this tiny flat, somewhere I used to be and will be again.  One of, if not the key support in this has been film, with its capacity for time travel, to provide a window onto what we might describe as the before, when we didn't live in fear of others and the physical disaster they might accidentally inflict on us.

One of the places I keep returning to is New York.  Ever since my film diet evolved in my mid-teens, it's been impossible not to idolize it all out of proportion, fascinated by its size, its landmarks, its atmosphere.  Of course this is all through the filter of film and it's easy to romanticize a place when you've never actually been there, but at university, in halls, I'd sit in the doorway of my room and pretend it was the window ledge of a brownstone watching the world go by.

Why then create a chronology?  The idea's been swirling around me for a few months, as I wondered if it was possible to track the building and development of this metropolis through cinema, to see what the earliest narrative about the city is and compare period and historical films with the movies produced in the era they're depicting.  Would there be clustering around the larger events in the city's history?

Find the results below.  The spine of this list is a page at the Wikipedia which I've trusted to give me accurate information about when films are set, so there are bound to be errors and do let me know if you spot anything.  The plan is for this to be an organic chronology with films being added in and out if it's obvious that something should or shouldn't been in here.  It will continue to evolve, there are plenty of documentaries to add.

Some rules I've worked by.  The chronology only includes films intended for theatrical release.  There have been hundreds of television series and movies over the years about New York but the ultimate intention for the list is that someone might actually sit down and watch the films in a particular year or even the whole thing (if they do nothing else for the rest of their lives) and adding lots of television most of it probably unavailable would just complicate matters.

Other than that the list is inclusive for the most part.  If a film has any scenes set in New York, they're included, even if they weren't actually shot in the city itself.  It's about how the city has been depicted over the years  But it has to have scenes set in New York or be are about the city and its people.  Films which show and talk about the reality of 9/11 are in here, the many interchangeable conspiracy documentaries are not.

As to the date when a film is included, it's been a judgement call.  If a film covers a long time span, I've tried to place it in the moment when the city has the most impact on the story.  If it isn't a historical film, I've just assumed its set in the year of release based on the information available from the synopsis, watching the trailer and my own memory of seeing the film.  Again, there will be errors.  Do let me know etc etc.

Finally, the documentaries are marked in italics in case anyone decides to stick with reality, or at least reality through a documentarian's eye.  I haven't separated out the newer films set in an older period because it made the chronology even more difficult to read.  Plus its an incentive to click the link on an interesting sounding title and discover when the film was made in contrast with those around it.

If I've learnt anything from this exercise, it's that there are many films by well known directors with incredible casts which have become all but forgotten, especially from the 1960s and 1970s.  Remarkably a lot of them are available for rental on streaming services, so it's worth checking JustWatch if something takes your fancy.

New York, New York.

Film A brief break from my blog hiatus (I'm catching up on some reading and watching documentaries about films if you must know) because this supercut of shots from New York movies, which after sci-fi tend to be my favourite movies, is too good not to embed here. Gothamist has a list of most of the films included of which I've only not seen Devil, Madagascar and Escape from New York (of all things).

"That plant, that plant that people line up to see even though it smells like dead fish."

TV You will have seen the trailer for the Gilmore Girls revival. I would have posted it here already but it was everywhere. But just in case, or so you can watch it for the three hundred and twenty third time:



Not since The Sirens of Time ... anyway ... the key element which has been remarked upon script wise is how its designed to underscore that this is a story set in the now, referencing Amy Schumer and John Oliver. But mores to the point, in the middle of Lorelai's bit, Rory dives into her iPhone and searches for information about what the bad smelling plant is, which does feel weird if you've just ended a binge of all seven seasons and the last time you saw these characters Rory's grandpa was trying to find a decent wifi signal in his house by holding his laptop behind a plant, everyone had only just graduated to "burner" mobiles and people still used pagers.

Anyway, the point of me writing this about a coincidence.  Rory gets her answer, presumably from the wikipedia: "Corpse flower" and she does this on almost the same day that an example of the species is in a blooming cycle at New York’s botanical garden in the Bronx and sure enough Lorelei's quite correct. People have queued up to see this oddly beautiful monstrosity and The Guardian was there to find out if indeed it does smell like a dead fish:

"“It smells like lettuce when you take it out of the bag,” a woman yelled from the crowd of onlookers in the Enid A Haupt conservatory. “It smells like the aquarium. Like the penguin enclosure,” another added. The odor came in waves as onlookers jostled for the best spot to take photos and selfies with the giant flower. Some left holding their noses."

Seasons Come, Seasons Go.

Architecture The Four Seasons in New York is closing, or at least closing in its present state. Forever mentioned as the place to be seen in New York based films and so therefore on the list of destinations for those of us who aren't even sure if we'll make it there (or anywhere for that matter) everything is being shut down and sold off. The aptly named Jason Farago offers an obituary:

"There are elegant restaurants and erotic restaurants, restaurants for business and restaurants for pleasure – and one that was all of these things, more beautiful than any other. But after six decades, the Four Seasons, as stately as ever in its glass box off Park Avenue, will complete its last service on Saturday. Then the restaurant – the place Jackie Kennedy called “the cathedral”, an acme of modernist design outshining any other space in New York – will be despoiled. The tables, the furnishings, and even the pots and pans will be flogged off at auction later this month. The season is summer. But for architectural preservationists, students of modern design, and lovers of New York, this is a winter of discontent."

The whole article's worth it for the ending to be honest. You can just imagine the staff off camera leaning against stuff. We've all seen that film too.

Ride Through The Night.

Theatre Advertising rules were recently changed in the UK so that critic quotes on posters had to reflect exactly what was originally written. In some cases, PR firms have responded by replacing well known wordsmiths with members of the social media class. Well. This New Yorker article about sleeping on subways includes a different, rather novel approach:

"A musical comedy called, simply “Subways Are for Sleeping”—one with impeccable pedigree, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Jule Styne, and starring Carol Lawrence—débuted on Broadway in 1961. (You can listen to the romantic song “Ride Through The Night.” above) The concept was that well-dressed homeless people, a self-chosen underground sect, secretly lived and loved on the subways. The show got so-so notices, and then produced one of the most notorious stunts in theatre history, when the incorrigible producer David Merrick placed an ad with quotes from all the leading newspaper critics of the day—it was a day when there were many—praising the show only for the world to discover that these were not the actual critics but fellow-New Yorkers with the same names: a sort of straphangers’ revolt against the professional reviewers. (Someone at Encores should revive the show for this New York moment. The score sounds terrific.)"

The New Yorker on the Eggs from Farmers Markets.

Food Eggs are eggs. As far as I've always known, eggs are eggs and don't change much from place to place, supermarket to farmer market. Some are evidently larger than others or last longer in the kitchen (to fridge or not to fridge?) and yet here's The New Yorker to dissuade me from my folly. David Darlington describes the kind of mania which takes hold when you find and egg which everything your wildest dreams might comprehend:

"Let me be clear: I’m not talking about just any eggs from the farmers’ market. Several venders there sell eggs; all are better than the ones from the grocery store, and some are still available in winter, even if you arrive after the market opens. I’m referring to eggs from Riverdog Farm, which, all of us in line agree, are of a different order. Technically they come from the Capay Valley, forty miles northwest of Sacramento, but as far as we’re concerned their origin is APIAU: A Pre-Industrial Agrarian Utopia. Where you live, there might be a farmer’s market that sells similar eggs; you might even collect APIAU-type eggs from chickens you raise yourself. But to us, Riverdog eggs—whose rich, earthy, pudding-like yolks are more orange than yellow, especially the laughable-if-it-weren’t-so-depressing excuse for yellow in eggs from the grocery store, which taste like nonfat milk as opposed to whipping cream—are unique. So unique that they cost eight dollars a dozen, and in winter each customer is limited to only a dozen—and, in particularly lean weeks, when the chickens are especially indisposed, encouraged to take only half a dozen. (To which we reply, “Dream on.”)"

The Doors in New York City.

Photography From npr, the kind of story which doesn't work on the radio:

"Between November 1975 and September 1976, a man named Roy Colmer decided to photograph New York City's doors. Not all of New York City's doors. No doors in particular. And in no real particular order. But his aptly named Doors, NYC project amounted to more than 3,000 photos, which now live with the New York Public Library.

"If you're like me and want to obsessively look at every single one, the best way to do that is here. But then, I did that so you don't have to. Firstly, note the door on the bottom left. For every dozen-ish nondescript doors, you'll find a little treat — like a poster of a cat ..."

My favourite? The one which says boldly, "CLOGS OF COURSE" because of course, clogs.

Lost in New York.

Travel In a lot of ways this Gothamist piece about the lost and found section at the Long Island Railroad isn't that different the many of the piece about lost and found sections in railway networks. That doesn't mean it isn't fascinating:

"Books never come back," Henry Felton said as he propped a surfboard against a shelf of laptops. "The books that I get, people aren't looking for. And the ones people are looking for, they never come in. People come in for nothing things like a shopping bag of toilet paper or a coffee cup. But the most expensive things—an iPhone 6—nobody's come in for it yet." Felton is the supervisor of the Long Island Rail Road Lost & Found; it's his job to collect, catalog, and try to return everything that comes in from the trains and stations. His work affords him a keyhole view into the private worlds of others. "You see people's lives play out right in front of you with the things they leave behind," he said."

Like Ives.

Music The Connecticut studio of composer Charles Ives has been painstakingly recreated at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Washington Heights, New York, even the view from the windows:

"You have to wind through the wide gallery spaces of the Academy to find yourself suddenly back in time in the studio, which is accompanied by a small exhibition with scores and photographs. The pencil shavings have been left in the sharpener, his secret stash of alcohol preserved in its hiding place, a cane is hooked over the piano chair, and rumpled hats rest on top of books and his father’s old cornet. The royalties from his music were previously bequeathed by his wife to the Academy, where they fund scholarships in his name."

Seinfeld Without Seinfeld.

Nothing from LJ Frezza on Vimeo.

TV "Scenes from "Seinfeld" (1989-1998) where nothing happens. A supercut of empty shots. A New York without people." Keep watching, keep watching.

Paddy Randall.

Food Modern Farmer reports on a new scheme under Hell's Gate Bridge in New York to create urban rice paddies at Randall’s Island Urban Farm. After a bit of experimentation it's easier than you might think:

"(Farm manager Nick) Storrs started tinkering with rice three years ago. First, he needed to choose the right variety. The indica strain (of rice) depends on intense heat to reach maturity. Japonica rice, on the other hand, reaches maturity based on seasonal day length. Turns out, New York is on roughly the same latitude as Japan (where much japonica is grown).

"Storrs says New York’s climate is “not not a problem”: The window of temperate growing time won’t naturally bring rice to maturity. So — like other Northeastern farmers who’ve been experimenting with rice — he starts rice seedlings in greenhouses, in March. They fully develop indoors before being moved to the paddies in June."

Pill Mill.

Law New York Magazine reports on this month's raid of the biggest "pill mill" in the city and I've gained an extra piece of knowledge being young and naive enough to know that there was such a thing as a "pill mill". A "pill mill" is a drugs den in which real Doctors dispense prescribable drugs for recreational purposes which are inevitably more difficult to prosecute because the police have the extra burden of having to prove, beyond reasonable doubt that the establishment and its employees aren't dispensing prescribable drugs for medical reasons:

"The first physician to be noticed over-prescribing at an Astramed clinic wasn’t Lowe, but a doctor named Tomasito Virey, who in the summer of 2012 made it to the top of the New York State Department of Health’s list of frequent prescribers of Oxycodone. The previous year, he’d signed 3,208 individual prescriptions — that’s 60 scrips a week, or 48 percent more prescriptions than the next closest physician. When a local NBC reporter asked Virey why he prescribed so much Oxy, the doctor replied, “We have a lot, a lot, a lot of sick patients.” Even back then, neighbors were calling Astramed a pill mill. But the local NBC report effectively derailed an investigation the DEA had been conducting into the clinic. Virey stopped prescribing Oxycodone as soon as he became a TV news star, and that Astramed office closed up shop, putting the Feds back at square one. "

Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art.

Art The Ben Uri Gallery is The London Jewish Museum of Art, originally founded in 1915. Find above one of their periodic Q&A events with David Glasser, Ben Uri's Chair and Chief Executive interviewing NY attorney Howard Spiegler.

Model eats designer bag on New York City subway.

"And here we are once again at the sixteenth annual New Year Rockin Eve coming to you live from the..."

That Day As January shifts into February and we all begin to get the measure of 2014, here's a short documentary about one of the icons of the turning of the year, One Times Square in New York and because I'm me, there was indeed a moment while watching this when I did say, out loud, "Oh so that's why it's called Times Square ..."

Paper Busts.

Art Chinese paper sculptures stretch imaginations:

"The line of pure white busts sitting in Li Hongbo’s Beijing studio could be found in any art classroom around the world. But when the Chinese artist places his hands on one, what had seemed like solid plaster transforms into a live, amorphous mass. They are neither plaster nor clay, but thousands of fine pieces of paper."

"Hey, isn’t that Uma Thurman over there?"

Commerce Rizzoli, the (in)famous bookshop at 31 West Fifty-seventh Street in New York is looking for a new home thanks to the news that its building and a few others are to be demolished to make way for yet another skyscraper.  Jon Michaud laments its passing in The New Yorker:

"Frequented by celebrities, top-name designers, wealthy New Yorkers, and foreign businessmen, the customers were, to say the least, demanding. The proximity to prominence—Hey, isn’t that Uma Thurman over there? Look out, Lagerfeld just walked in—and the baroque décor helped to compensate for the poor pay, the short lunch breaks, and the occasional verbal abuse from those we served. During my years there, Madonna, Michael Jackson, the Queen of Thailand, and Elton John all dropped in. Oriana Fallaci had an office on the sixth floor and would storm in and out as if war had just been declared. We learned to affect nonchalance in the presence of such glamour. When David Bowie came up to the register one afternoon, my colleague Lara Tomlin (now an illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker) looked at the name on his credit card—David Jones—and quipped, “Hey, weren’t you in the Monkees?” (For the record, Bowie was a good sport. He laughed.)"

NYC LED.

Ordinance The Verge reports that CBS reports that New York City is planning to replace all of its street lighting with LEDs by 2017:

"New York City is transitioning its 250,000 street lights to energy-efficient LEDs in an upgrade that should be completed by 2017. CBS reports that Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the time frame today, noting that the upgraded lights will save city taxpayers around $14 million a year once the transition is complete. The savings are two-fold: LEDs consume less power than their high-pressure sodium counterparts, resulting in around $6 million in savings, and they also have a much longer lifespan, lasting up to 20 years. Current street lights last an average of just six years, Bloomberg said."

Does anyone know how many LEDs there are on Liverpool's streets? Might this be something we should be looking towards if the potential savings are this impressive?

The Wisdom of Lou Reed.

"I don't know anyone in New York who doesn't say 'I'm leaving'. I've been thinking of leaving New York for... uh... thirty-five years now." -- Lou Reed, Blue in the Face.

Music For all his albums, especially Metal Machine Music, this is my favourite Lou Reed moment, his improvisational involvement in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's film Blue In The Face, which was knocked together over a weekend after they'd completed shooting on their much more considered film, Smoke, utilising the same sets.  He appears throughout the film offering counterpoint to the action and this hopeful YouTuber has edited all his pieces together.

"That's how they ended that situation..."

Photography On the beat with New York's crime photographer:

"Marc Hermann, now in his early 30s, worked as a staff crime photographer for the New York Daily News for years. He began wondering what it would be like to see how past crime scenes from New York's streets have changed."

"His Then and Now series went viral, and he took BBC News to some of his favourite locations. It is partly a tribute to the old-timers who captured the dramatic aftermath of organised crime in its hey-day, and an homage to the city's turbulent history."

Then and Now can be seen here.