The Off-Ramp TemperaTour ... CyberFrequencies and life on the web ... Lou Adler on Monterey Pop ... Burning Man vets ... the historical Arab roots of Ground Zero ... Wm Link, Columbo's co-creator, speaks!
Marc Haefele: the Arab roots of Ground Zero
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele lived in New York City for many years, so he wasn't shocked that Muslims wanted to build a community center, and perhaps a mosque, near Ground Zero. After all, he knew they'd been a major part of that neighborhood since -- are you sitting down? -- 1870. UPDATE: Commentator Marc Haefele filed this commentary last year, when the controversy of the day was the fight over building a Muslim community center a few blocks from Ground Zero. The controversy seems to be simmering now, with any construction in the old Burlington Coat Factory building probably years away. The controversy struck Marc as odd, because he remembered what the Ground Zero site used to be long before the Twin Towers were built.
The Return of Little Syria
By Marc Haefele
In all the discussions and arguments brought regarding the proposed P51 Islamic Community Center's proximity to the city of the World Trade Center in downtown New York, I'm astonished to see that one important historical fact hasn't turned up. It's about time that it did.
It's that the controversial cultural center (not a mosque, although it may include one) is close to another important historical site, obliterated when the WTC was begun in 1967.
It was Manhattan's old Arab District, which flourished for nearly a century. Yes, much of the region the P51's denigrators defend as sacred American ground, was, from about 1870 on, the home of many thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants -- largely Muslim.
This was "Little Syria," both an Arab ghetto and a popular tourist zone, which the Los Angeles Herald proclaimed in April 11, 1909 as having "the mystery of the Orient upon it."
(Photo: "A man, wearing a fez, selling drinks from an ornate, portable, samovar-like dispenser in the Syrian Quarter of New York City." US Library of Congress.)
Little Syria was frequented by the humble and the celebrities--including actor John Barrymore, who loved to eat at a place he'd persuaded the owner to rename "The Sheik," after the Valentino film. Other popular restaurants included "The Nile," "Little Egypt," and "Lebanon." The coffee houses were renowned for their dense, aromatic brews. In 1941, the New York Times reported Little Syrians as "friendly; they readily enter into conversation with the visitor, to talk about their native lands and customs."
(Photo: Syrian children playing in New York street. US Library of Congress.)
A 1905 Baltimore Sun reporter noted, "troops of black-haired, olive-skinned children play in the streets, and lithe, slender and generally pretty mothers gossip in the doorways; the fruit stalls, bakeries and groceries are stocked with many things unfamiliar to the American eye and palate." Little Syria was so important a part of the New York ethnic scene for so long that it now seems incredible it's so completely forgotten.
The district ran down the Lower West Side, along Washington Street south to what is now Battery Park City. Unfortunately, it flourished before poor neighborhoods had any standing in urban planning. In 1940, the Brooklyn Battery tunnel erased much of it. By 1950, the West Side Highway (long since torn down) destroyed more of Little Syria.
When I showed up in the early 1960s, just a block or two remained--including Sahadi's market at 195 Washington Street, which had the best baklava and apricot leather in the city. As well as some wonderfully crafted musical instruments -- ouds and hourglass drums. In 1967 it vanished under the WTC jackhammers -- even the original streets are now gone. The old businesses moved to Brooklyn or died. And I moved away too.
(Sahadi's today. Flikr/Rachael Ash.)
Now, in another century, the tragedy of 9-11 is offered as an excuse to refuse some 700,000 New York Moslems their right to observe and celebrate their faith where they please. Freedom of Religion means
nothing, of course, if it only applies to religions everyone approves of.
But there's another reason for P51 to be built where it's planned. It's that the location is so close to New York's lost but once vital Islamic-Middle Eastern past ... which the new center for an emerging new Islamic population cannot but serve to commemorate and recall to us.
(Marc Haefele is a literary and cultural commentator for KPCC's Off-Ramp.)
Off-Ramp TemperaTour Returns
We did this Mountains-to-Ocean tour of LA climate in 2007 with weatherman Bill Patzert of JPL and and Steve LaDochy of CalState LA -- tracking temps from Pasadena to Griffith Park to Disney Hall to the Pier to Mt Wilson ... all in a single day. This week seems like an excellent time to bring it back.
Playing Heat Wave Hang-Ten Hookey
KPCC's surf reporter Brian Watt talks with a man who played hookey this week to catch the big waves that accompanied our heat wave. He refused to give his identity, on the grounds that it might incriminate him.
(Real caption for photo: "Surf riding has no age limit. At the Doheny Surfing Club is Ed Proctor, who will be 80 in two months. Photo dated: August 5, 1961. Credit: LAPL/Herald-Examiner collection)
50 years later: Lou Adler on Monterey Pop
UPDATE 6/22/2017: This month marks the 50th anniversary of Monterey Pop; so it's a great time to republish our conversation with one of the men who made it happen. Here's show biz historian Alex Ben Block interviewing the one and only Lou Adler.
In our continuing series of interviews with entertainment legend Lou Adler (conducted by Hollywood historian Alex Ben Block of The Hollywood Reporter), we hear the true roots of the music festival Monterey Pop. Adler also tells Alex how he got back the footage that eventually became the enduring Pennebaker documentary about the festival.
Burning Man Vets on the allure of the desert art festival
Whiteout sandstorms, 115-degree heat, freezing nights, alkalai dust in your nostrils and skivvies ... these are the drawbacks of Burning Man. But they're also the filter that keep the weeklong arts festival strong and true to its purpose.
With Burning Man set to start Monday, Off-Ramp host talks with participants Christopher Murray and Alexei Othenin-Girard.
CyberFrequencies goes to Craigslist Bootcamp
CyberFrequencies, Off-Ramp's bi-weekly look at life on the web ...
Goodbye, Columbus Day. Hello #ColumboDay!
It's Columbus Day, honoring, as anthropologist Jack Weatherford puts it, the man "who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history:"
Autumn would hardly be complete in any elementary school without construction-paper replicas of the three cute ships that Columbus sailed to America, or without drawings of Queen Isabella pawning her jewels to finance Columbus' trip.
This myth of the pawned jewels obscures the true and more sinister story of how Columbus financed his trip. The Spanish monarch invested in his excursion, but only on the condition that Columbus would repay this investment with profit by bringing back gold, spices, and other tribute from Asia. This pressing need to repay his debt underlies the frantic tone of Columbus' diaries as he raced from one Caribbean island to the next, stealing anything of value.
After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in the one important commodity he had found in ample supply - human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.
-- Anthropologist Jack Weatherford, Macalaster College
So instead of Columbus, let's honor Columbo!
Here's my 2010 interview with William Link, co-creator of "Columbo," along with "Mannix" and "Murder, She Wrote." Link explains how he and his partner came up with the idea of Columbo, and why they didn't approach it as a "whodunit."