Showing posts with label NYC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYC. Show all posts

February 21, 2024

Dispatch #400: NYC's Waterside Station

  

  NYC's Waterside Station (far left)—with its trio of distinctive smokestacks—once sat along the East River beside the United Nations (right).

   Years before I worked in New York City, I got a crash course in Manhattan geography courtesy of Marvel Comics. 

 Let me explain: the cities in DC comics—like Superman's Metropolis and Batman's Gotham City—are fictional places, but the heroes in the Marvel comics I read as a kid lived and worked in NYC—with many of its real-life locations providing the backdrop for their otherwise fantastical tales.

 For instance, I didn't set foot inside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art until 1988, but I'd "visited" it twelve years earlier courtesy of Spider-Man

  Thanks to those same comics, I knew the Fantastic Four lived in Midtown, Avengers Mansion was on the Upper East Side, and that Doctor Strange's Sanctum Santorum was down in Greenwich Village. Believe it or not, this information actually helped me navigate the city when I arrived there years later.

Amazing Spider-Man #89, 1970

  I suppose that's why when I read the reports here and here about plans for Freedom Plaza on Manhattan's east side, I immediately thought of the very first time I saw the area—in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man #89.

Spidey spots Doc Ock at Waterside Station, ASM #89

  In the story, Spider-Man is desperately searching Manhattan for one of his most dangerous foes, Dr. Otto Octavious (aka Doc Ock), and eventually finds him wreaking havoc at a power plant along the East River (as seen above in the gorgeous artwork by Gil Kane and John Romita).

  Eighteen years later, while exploring United Nations Plaza along the East River for the first time, I instantly recognized the distinctive trio of smokestacks at nearby Waterside Generating Station as the location of Spidey's 1970 battle with Doc Ock (see the pic at the top of today's dispatch).

The former home of the Waterside Generating Station in NYC 

  Waterside Station was decommissioned and demolished about four years after I left the Big Apple—you can read more about it here—and the site remained mostly undeveloped in the twenty years since until plans for Freedom Plaza were recently announced.

Proposed design for Freedom Plaza (left) along FDR Drive 

  The development looks to be an impressive addition to Manhattan's East Side—and I'll admit I've got my fingers crossed that Spidey and Doc Ock might tussle there someday, too.


 There's more to come in the next dispatch.

 ©2024 SummitCityScribe


October 6, 2023

Dispatch #278: Cannibalism at the Disco

 

     I've been endeavoring to focus my posts this month on all things spooky, eerie, and macabre, and since today's Dispatch deals with cannibalism, I think it fits the bill quite nicely.

     In early 1971, I heard the song Timothy by The Buoys on local radio for the very first time. A disturbing tale of miners trapped underground in a cave-in—and the gruesome things they do to survive—it was nothing like the cheery pop tunes I usually heard on WLYV. 

     Even though I was just a kid, I understood immediately what the song was about and got a juvenile kick out of hearing something that I probably shouldn't have been listening to at that age.

     Of course, I was already heavily into monsters and horror movies at the time, so hearing a creepy rock tune about two trapped miners eating a third didn't give me any nightmares. 

     Songwriter Rupert Holmes went on to have a successful music career. You can read about the history behind his song Timothy here.

    Many years later, while living in NYC, I attended a Morrissey concert at what was then known as The Uptown Ritz (to differentiate it from the Ritz down in Greenwich Village)—located at 254 W. 54th Street in Manhattan. 

254 W. 54th Street in 1992.

     I knew at that time the venue had started life as a legitimate theater before becoming a CBS Radio/TV studio—and then the legendary 1970s disco Studio 54. What I hadn't known then was that in-between CBS and the disco era, the office building had also been the home of Scepter Records.

    Scepter was famous as the label of iconic 1960s girl-groups such as The Shirelles and the Chiffons, both of whom recorded at the label's original home at 1674 Broadway. 

     In 1965, however, Scepter moved to their new digs at 254 W. 54th Street, where acts as varied as The Velvet Underground, B.J. Thomas—and yes, The Buoys—cut studio tracks. I knew none of that history when I visited the Ritz on November 27th, 1992, however.

     I had a great time at the Morrissey show that night. Moz—on tour for his excellent Your Arsenal album—was in fine voice and hadn't yet veered off into the uncomfortable political statements he's infamous for these days. During the set from his opening act, Jet Black Machine, I remember glancing around the venue and thinking about the glory days of disco at Studio 54

     I had absolutely no idea back then that just a few floors above my head, Timothy—the song about cannibalism that gave me the shivers as a kid—had been recorded in a Scepters Records studio. Thinking about it now brings a mischievous grin to my face—just like the one I wore as a kid while listening to that macabre little song on WLYV back in 1971.

     Postscript: After the uptown Ritz closed in the mid-1990s, the space was vacant until the end of the decade, when The Roundabout Theatre Company found its home there—where it remains to this day.


     There's more to come in the next dispatch.

     ©2023 SummitCityScribe