Around midnight, I joined the line to get into Smalls, a joint for jazz diehards in Greenwich Village. The price is ten dollars at the door, no minimum, stay·as long as you want. The music goes from ten o’clock until eight the next morning, and the survivors get breakfast. It’s straight-up jazz, no big names and no tourists, at least not the sort who habituate the Blue Note. A couple of generations ago Small’s Paradise was one of the great Harlem jazz clubs; I can’t decide if the name of this ace is an homage to Small’s Paradise or just an apt description of its size. The owner is a guy in his mid-forties named Mitch Borden, who has mortgaged his house two or three times to keep Smalls afloat. I met him for the first time eight or nine years ago when I was walking along West Tenth Street one afternoon and saw him putting up the announcement for that week’s gigs. He was an engaging promoter of his little jazz club. In those days he didn’t necessarily collect the cover charge. But times have changed; one of his hires collects the ten bucks. Not only that, when I saw him outside last night, he was giving out handbills for a place over on Christopher Street called Fat Cat, a combination pool hall and jazz venue. The deal is this: you can go to Fat Cat and pay their fifteen-dollar cover (one drink included), then go back to Smalls for free. When he told me that the music was starting at Fat Cat in five minutes, I chose to get off the line and go to where I could listen to the music. The wait was about a half-hour rather than five minutes, but no matter. The crowd was mostly students who were quite into the music, sitting at tables and in comfortable chairs. Shortly before the music started Borden was walking around the room, checking things out. The quintet included Jim Rotondi on trumpet, Mike DiRubbo on saxophone, David Hazeltine at the piano, Paul Gill on bass, and Willie Jones Ill on percussion, and a fine group it is. They played for close to 90 minutes, with hints of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. They don’t yet have a guiding genius but they’re clearly on their way. This is the sort of music scene that interests me: a knowledgeable and committed audience listening to good music at a cheap price in a more-or-less unknown place. Talking to Rotondi afterwards, I found out they play on Thursdays at Smoke, a jazz place uptown near Columbia University, which used to be Augie’s, where one could play chess, drink beer, and listen to a jam session all at the same time.
Earlier this month a temporary memorial to the World Trade Center and its nearly three thousand dead began: twin shafts of light shining skywards. From the roof of my house the angle of view is such that they appear to be one, and when the sky is overcast, which has been often lately, the beams of light hit and diffuse against the clouds, seeming almost to be shining a pathway through them to something brilliant beyond. This memorial is certainly very beautiful and even poetic, but it is meant to be strictly ephemeral, lasting only until mid-April. And its lightness and absence of solidity seems an unfortunate metaphor for the inability of the various stakeholders down there - the leaseholder for the World Trade Center, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Port Authority, and, last but by no means least, the Lower Manhattan Development: Corporation - to get their act together. For example, the reconstruction of the destroyed subway tunnel that bisected the site is proceeding full speed ahead with no thought and no provision for much discussed infrastructure improvements such as a “transit corridor” along Fulton Street from Battery Park City to Broadway, meaning that once that project or something else is agreed, a lot of work now being done will have to be undone. The removal of the wreckage is almost complete, and construction on the site of 7 World Trade Center may start as early as June, so serious discussions and decisions need to start soon.
Riding my bike up Church Street today was interesting in two respects. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the layout of lower Manhattan, Church Street is a block west of Broadway and is the eastern boundary of the World Trade Center site. The last time I had taken the bike up Church Street was two days before the incident, when we all took things like those towers for granted. Riding uptown on Church Street was one more indication of things coming round to normal, even given the fact of a large viewing platform at Liberty Street for all the tourists. The simple fact of a direct, fast route uptown from the Battery being restored is a good thing. Getting a look into the excavation as I went by, I was astounded by its sheer size. Looking down into the bottom of the pit, seven levels below the street, I could see the portals to the PATH subway tunnels to New Jersey. I could see the massive retaining wall around the site and where that wall had been partly destroyed by the collapsing south tower. Across Liberty Street from the site, the heavily damaged One Bankers Trust Plaza has netting covering the facade and a huge American flag. That building may yet be demolished. Elsewhere, construction goes at quite a pace. Over at the World Financial Center, a huge sign facing the Hudson River reads, “The World Financial Center - Shops, Restaurants Now Open.” The Century 21 department store across Church Street from the World Trade Center has reopened and seems as busy as ever. These stirrings of new life are good and necessary, but the larger questions about the future of lower Manhattan, specifically whether businesses, displaced or not, will move back there, are yet to be answered. And the answers will not come from some sort ci providential revelation. We will have to make the answers ourselves. That requires a different political agenda than has prevailed in this city in the last forty years. Some tiny local agendas that have been given full operatic strength will have to be give way to a larger municipal interest. Nobody wants garbage incinerators, but we have no more room to store our own garbage, and the shipment of garbage to other states for disposal seems unlikely to remain an option. The redevelopment of the city has to include political accountability and not run roughshod as did the public works programs under the late Robert Moses between the 1920s and 1960s, but massive public works expenditures are necessary to build up the city in the long run and to provide a lot of jobs in the short run. The list goes on, and it is of staggering size, as big as that excavation on Church Street.