George’s slightly off-center view of the world
I have recently written about urban renewal and the consequences for those in its way. Here is twelve-minute film celebrating the never-built freeway through a southeast Portland neighborhood and the subsequent change of direction in the city’s planning. It’s from 2006, so you won’t see the homeless who have since set up camp in Waterfront Park.
Joe Brancatelli is a travel writer. His audience is primarily people who travel for business. You may or may not be amused by this recent column: a tongue-in-cheek review of advice about the dangers to tourists in a certain country.
I was not quite nineteen years old when I first visited New York City. I rode a bus from the Port Authority terminal to Staten Island, where my father’s WWII buddy lived. He put me up for the night before I met up with my friend who was to arrive the next day. My father’s friend and his teen-aged son took me on a brief tour of the city that evening. The highlight was Nathan’s Famous on Coney Island. He bought me a hot dog and a glass of beer. (The legal drinking age in New York at the time was eighteen.) I stood at an outside counter with my hot dog and beer. I felt pretty cool.
The story of Nathan Handwerker is pretty cool, too.
Nicholas Kristof grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Oregon. He works for the New York Times, traveling the world, reporting from wherever there is human suffering. In 2005, when pundit Bill O’Reilly was promoting his annual “War on Christmas,” Kristof offered to show him what war really looked like.
“If you want to do something journalistic, come along with me on my next trip to Darfur. You’ll have to leave your studio and deal with people who, if they don’t like you, will shoot you in a moment. But you’ll also have the chance to take a genuinely important and overlooked story and bring it into people’s homes. So come on, Bill. What’ll it be? More ranting from your studio? Or real journalism?”
Mr. O’Reilly did not take him up on the offer.
Mr. Kristof recently published a piece on a timely subject: race and white delusion.
“My hunch is that we will likewise look back and conclude that today’s calls for racial justice, if anything, understate the problem — and that white America, however well meaning, is astonishingly oblivious to pervasive inequity.”
For ninety minutes, Tony Joe White made a Portlandia audience believe it was in the swamps of Louisiana.
Willie and Laura Mae Jones
Rainy Night in Georgia
and of course
The Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series in 1955. Two years later, after the team played what was to be its last game at Ebbets Field, the Dodgers announced they were moving west to Los Angeles. Brooklyn has never forgiven them.
Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley began construction on the only privately-financed baseball park since Yankee Stadium in 1923 and until the Giants’ Whatever-Is-the-Current-Phone-Company Park in 2000. (The 2008 version of Yankee Stadium cost taxpayers $1.2 billion.)
When the new $23-million, 56,000-capacity, stadium opened, featuring an “unobstructed view of home plate from every seat,” fans noticed there were only two drinking fountains, one in each dugout. O’Malley said it was merely an oversight and denied that the reason was to increase beer and soft-drink sales. His remedy was to place Dixie cups in the rest rooms. The city Health Department considered that a code violation and ordered drinking fountains be installed.
(When Disneyland opened in 1955, Walt Disney claimed a plumbers strike forced him to choose between rest rooms and drinking fountains. Disney reasoned, “People can buy Pepsi Cola but they can’t pee in the street.”)
Walter O’Malley, were he still alive, would have the last laugh. Public drinking fountains are out of fashion and fans now pay $5.75 for a bottle of water at Dodgers Stadium.
