I applied for a 1-bedroom apartment on far West 57th Street. I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance that I’ll get it but it would be like a homecoming, or a return.
The first night I slept in New York City was on what was then considered “Far West 57th Street“, at the apartment of a college acquaintance who put a smile on my face earlier that day when he said “Welcome to New York.”
My first real job in New York was on West 57th Street, at the slippery-sloped 9 West building.
The most interesting human being I ever met in New York City lived straight across the street from 9 West, in a penthouse suite on 58th Street.
The first bar I entered in New York was Kennedy’s on West 57th Street. A college friend and I got kicked out of Kennedy’s because said friend was wearing a wife beater. Sleeveless shirts were forbidden at that classy establishment. The bouncer was an asshole about it. I never went back, and today I take some retroactive pleasure in seeing that the place recently closed.
The first restaurant I returned to time and time again was Wine and Apples, on West 57th Street. I once organized a mass gathering of friend and foe alike from a dialup Internet BBS, before most people knew what BBS meant, or what an Internet was.
The first woman I ever met from the Internet was 2 hours late to our planned meeting on West 57th Street. She was 6’8″ and might have weighed 300 pounds. At the end of our lunch at 6th Avenue and West 57th Street she asked if I wanted to go to Coney Island. Then, as now, that amusement park seemed remote to the point of foreignity. We did not go to Coney Island and I never saw her again. Over a decade later our paths crossed on Facebook, where she mysteriously posted an “I Love You” video to my wall.
The first piano recital I saw in New York was at Carnegie Hall, on West 57th Street. Earl Wild performed. A fellow sitting next to me said he was a pianist. When I told him I had just moved to New York he grimaced, saying “This is a rough fuckin’ town.” Sure wish I knew who that guy was today. I’d like to tell him how right he was.
Among the first piano recitals I attended in New York was that of a Juilliard student at Steinway Hall on West 57th Street. The audience for this Juilliard student comprised mostly fellow Juilliard pianists. Steinway Hall was known for its basement, where over 100 Steinway grands lied in wait (laid in wait?) for the next traveling virtuoso to choose her or his darling instrument for the next night’s Carnegie Hall bash. At the recital’s intermission the entire audience descended into the Steinway Basement, and within a few moments every pianist present sat down at a Steinway and started playing. It was the closest thing to hell I had yet experienced, this brain-wringing cacophony of pianistic avalanche, and yet it was strangely charming. I wish I had it on tape. It wasn’t Mozart sonatas or Chopin Nocturnes (not to diminish the merits of those forms) but it was the Big Stuff: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 competed with Ravels’ Gaspard de la Nuit, which itself overlaid Stravinsky’s Petrushka Suite, etc.
A lot of memories from West 57th Street. I could go on, but hands are tired, and left arm has been mysteriously sore the last few days.
