I’m going to da movies. Be back tonight.

[Picture by Bags]

[Photo Credit: New York Magazine]

Happy weekend.

In the meantime, hope you have a good one. And yo, remember: Do something nice for yourself…

Or someone you know…

You deserve it. Say Word.

From the New York magazine archives, here’s a 1969 piece by Nicholas Pileggi on the Renaissance of the Upper West Side:

Five years ago the West Side of Manhattan was considered such a dangerously blighted area that invitations to parties on Riverside Drive were often rejected, large rent-controlled apartments were voluntarily given up and even Chicken Delight wouldn’t deliver. Today, while many of the area’s most critical problems remain, an unmistakable mood of confidence has replaced earlier premonitions of doom. Merchants, real-estate men, bankers, theatre owners, city planners, restaurateurs, newsdealers and the trustees of private schools all agree with what Mayor John V. Lindsay admits privately: “The Upper West Side is probably enjoying more of a renaissance today than any other single neighborhood of our city.”

In the 64-block-long area west of Central Park between Columbus Circle to the south and Columbia University to the north, the evidence is visible. Not only are there new low-and middle-income housing developments now where the rubble of abandoned buildings and slums stood just five years ago, but hundreds of the area’s crumbling rooming houses have been renovated to accommodate increasing numbers of middle-class tenants, and even a few of the neighborhood’s middle-European rococo hotels have been steam-cleaned. The same kind of young, successful and relatively affluent middle-class families that moved to the suburbs 20 years ago and to the East Side 10 years ago are moving to the West Side today, and while the neighborhood still has an ample supply of teenage muggers, parading homosexuals and old men who wear overcoats in July, the over-all mood of the area seems to have changed.

…Statistically the West Side’s 1968 crime figures place the area in the unenviable top third of the city’s 76 precinct-house totals. The 20th Precinct on West 68th Street and the 24th on West 100th encompass most of the Upper West Side, and their combined records show 36 homicides, 86 forced rapes, 8,478 burglaries, 1,097 felonious assaults, 3,233 robberies (muggings and stickups) and 6,762 larcenies (mostly pocketbook snatches) last year. The bulk of the West Side’s street crime today is the work of roving bands of 14-to-20-year-olds who mug, jostle and threaten their victims around or near the neighborhood parks during the evening and early morning hours. The effect of these crimes, committed, it sometimes seems, on everyone, or at least a friend or relative of everyone on the West Side, has been to create an atmosphere in which sudden noises produce quick frightened looks.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

[Photo Credit: Christian Monotone]

The other day, we talked about our favorite NYC pet peeves. And I forgot one of my favorites, the one that makes me my father’s son, full of righteous indignation: film crews who block off the sidewalks. In particular, the cocksure P.A.’s, wearing shorts, and strapped down with walkie talkies who stand around like the own the jernt and aggresively usher pedestrain traffic to the other side of the street. These yo-yo’s have infuriated me for so long that I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, just a hard look.

This morning, I got out of the subway in midtown and saw a couple of these dudes and I looked one of them up-and-down with a look of disgust on my face. He met my eyes, unsure of why I was giving him an attitude. I had to laugh at myself as I walked away. But I didn’t feel bad about giving him the molochio.

Bleecker Street, mid-Sixties (16mm)

[W 8th Street Heading West] from afarchives on Vimeo.

Most cool. The Internet wins again.