The Wit of the Staircase

Lost Park Ave. Crypt Unearthed

"John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s subterranean escape route out of 740 Park Avenue to the railroad tracks underneath the street (where his private train could pull up) has long been 'a wonderful urban myth,' says Michael Gross, author of 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building. Gross didn’t mention it in his book after the Rockefeller relatives denied it. But not everybody’s so sure. Stephen Del Savio, a subsurface plumber and vice-president of NYC Water Works, was working with his crew about fifteen feet under Park last summer and discovered a sealed-up vault. Upon entry, just outside 740, they found a series of brick chambers about ten feet tall, six feet wide, all with arched ceilings, branching off from 740’s basement. 'I was, like, Holy shit!’ he says. 'This thing was certainly leading somewhere.' Was it an old wine cellar? Remnants of a building built before 740?...

Link: Secret Park Avenue Crypt Unearthed! -- New York Magazine.

Another top hat, this one on Rockefeller.

Buy It For The Articles

Local Los Angeles hero Larry Flynt has published two thought provoking articles in the new issue of his polically forward pornographic magazine Hustler.

One is on Austin, Texas gadfly (and Wit favorite) Alex Jones' excellent blustery populist talk radio show, and his movement to expose 9/11 as an inside job--a U. S. Intelligence "black op."

On newsstands now!!

One Man's Weird Castle

A New York playwright found this odd, amazing Quasimodo apartment in The Dakota when he was a lad. He added a wife and two kids and yet couldn't leave its tiny confines...

"And though Mr. Sater pays little attention to furnishings, he has never been indifferent to this 9th-story courtyard apartment, on a floor of mostly maids’ rooms, where Boris Karloff and Judy Garland once lived and Leonard Bernstein had his studio.

Mr. Sater found it in the late 80s, when he was single, by hounding real estate agents a few times a week. Though he was still a struggling writer, he used all the money his great-grandmother had left him to buy it. The apartment is not large: The dining room-kitchen area is 10 by 24 feet.

The apartment does, however, have great charm: in the sleeping loft above the living room one can see the bones of the building’s gabled roof or look out over the rooftops to Central Park."

Link: Storming Broadway From Atop a Fortress - New York Times.

Lovecraft Lane: The Master And NYC's Kalem Club, 1924-1927

Professor Hex recommends:

"I just started Lovecraft's New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927, edited by Mara Kirk Hart and S.T. Joshi. Really fascinating thus far. The description of Kirk and Lovecraft walking through Greenwich Village and searching out surviving Colonial homes and architecture is great."

Link: Amazon.com: Lovecraft's New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927: Books: H., P. Lovecraft,Mara, Kirk Hart,S., T. Joshi.

Link: Professor Hex.

The Village's Minetta Lane, above.

"The Present In New York Is So Powerful The Past Is Lost"

Quote by John Jay Champman, photos featuring Mr. and Ma'am Wit of the Staircase (sometimes fresh, sometimes three-parties-into-an-evening not so) around various locales in New York.

“This Is New York And There's No Law Against Being Annoying”

Quote by William Kunstler, city photos from hotel window. Jeremy Blake talking with Malcolm McLaren, with whom he is making a film, me drinking and asleep, the two modes I have had since arriving. Crystal ship chandelier at ABC Home on Broadway.

New York Public Library Occult Sciences and Parapsychology Research Guide

"The New York Public Library has an extensive collection of materials on the occult. The General Research Division collects a wide range of topics including esoteric magic (as opposed to stage magic, which is collected by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), spiritualism and witchcraft. There are particularly strong collections on divination and Theosophy. The Science, Industry and Business Library collects materials on alchemy and flying saucers. Books on oriental mysticism and yoga are collected by the Asian and Middle Eastern Division. The Slavic and Baltic Division collects, in the original language, the works of Russian mystics, such as H.P. Blavatsky, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture collects titles on voodoo, santeria and related topics."

Link: NYPL, Occult Sciences and Parapsychology Research Guide.

Post-Modern Prophecy: Urgent Myths for Urgent Times?

Wit loves an outre theory, a new religion, a Freud basher (especially Deleuze) or a wiggy idea, but we have become increasingly wary of the chaos magicians, Crowleyites, Buddhists, Bonesmen, Scientologists, acid casualties, CIA spooks, Luciferians, vampires, Bavarian Illuminati, airhead exiled aristocrats, potheads, mystic momma's boys, slutty seekers, Yogargoyles, Rand Corporation Strangeloves, Lawrence Livermore MK Ultra madmen, and others of their a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing Los Angeles ilk.

All this doesn't seem open minded and charmingly L.A. vernacular anymore. It seems like constant earthquake weather with spooky protofascist mental malleability in the extended forecast. (Read Lawrence Rickels' excellent The Case Of California for an uncannily accurate prediction of the current Cali status quo.)

The Modernist project is starting to look pretty good compared to all the equally vain and increasingly certain mysticism from where we sit. So it is with pleasure that we recommend the following event with cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff and "mystical guru" Daniel Pinchbeck tonight in New York City. Together these fine men may help sort things out a bit.

"Post-Modern Prophecy: Urgent Myths for Urgent Times?

A dialogue between authors Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff"

Link: MAGPIE » THIS THURSDAY IN NYC: RUSHKOFF & PINCHBECK DIALOGUE — FREE..

Wit, despite having been made to suffer for this opinion time and again, still maintains that democratic culture is now dashing itself on the rocks of the aging Baby Boomers' immaturity and neurotic refusal of and displacement of death onto the young. Read Rickels on this subject below.

"In California, Rickels locates 'the intersection between technology and the unconscious' and thus reconstructs the political front of psychoanalysis which arose to combat National Socialism. California and Germany, he contends, are two coasts of an era that 'lets roll' in the Enlightenment and continues to this day. Kafka is the 'ultimate Kalifornian'. The fall of the Berlin wall and the San Francisco Earthquake appear 'symptomatically in sync'. And the invention of the California teenager - the archetypical adolescent - begins with 'a certain central European refusal of death'."

Link: Amazon.com: The Case of California: Books: Laurence A. Rickels,Laurence A. Rickels.

Between Glitter And Glamour: Great, Torn, Foolhardy Souls

"Well, there are always those who cannot distinguish between glitter and glamour....the glamour of Isadora Duncan came from her great, torn, bewildered, foolhardy soul."

--Dorothy Parker

Well, well, look at those four none-too-friendly yet so very knowing, so very cool blue eyes.

I remember when New York City downtown glamour meant catching the glint off mean, pretty sapphires like these, as wild and rare as eyes glimpsed on safari, I suppose. (But we at Wit wouldn't know, preferring as we do the wildlife of American cities with their gorgeous human plumage and their wild rock and roll animal songs more than anything glimpsed through binoculars on the African veldt.)

If they still make them like this they're being carefully hidden from We of Wit. And haven't these two forgotten more than we'll ever know about what it means to be cool in New York City when New York City was still cool?

Unlike the rest of us, whose eyes are alluring highlights of some duller whole, the bodies above are just second-thought husks--hosts borrowed by a couple pair of astounding optical orbs. That kind of ocean-bottom aqua egg wears the rest of the body, asshole, and the exhausted flesh just does its blue bidding.

Ever seen a photo of Manhatta's hip downtown granddaddy Walt Whitman, childdrins of the Staircase? Well lean in close, closer: He wore these exact same gaslamplit turquoise eyeballs first, and I don't mean they're merely similar, I mean they're the same fucking pair of undead Lower East Side eyes!

Look how they hover, untethered to particular skulls, as if they are the midnight lanterns of Lower Manhattan when it didn't yet reach above Peter Stuyvesant's Bowery farm. Neither of these pale perfect downtown ovals would look out of place emerging from some eighteenth century four a.m. fog rolled recently in from the East River, would it?

But if you're out some late night and either face from the American Avant-Gothic above looks past you as if you were a already a revenant, don't despair. Remember, they only wear Manhattan's crown jewels for a short time. We must pardon them for gazing beyond us and into the indigo New York City night, where the undreamt-of blue-eyed bohemian future waits to be born.

Link: Marc Jacobs After-Party: Party Coverage on Style.com.

Filmmaker Vincent Gallo and Sonic Youth guitarist Kim Gordon, twin bohemian towers, as stately and significant as any fucking skyscraper, at a party this week in New York to celebrate Marc Jacobs' Spring 2007 collection.

The Future An Experiment At 222

“For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment” wrote former Chelsea Hotel resident Mark Twain. After our post about the disappearance of The Gramercy Park Hotel earlier today, we received an email from the wonderful Chelsea Hotel blog below, whose fears for The Chelsea mirror our own.

Link: Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog: Schrager and Schnabel Build Hotel From Old Mushroom Crates.

Careful readers will remember that The Chelsea is where Mr. and Mlle. Staircase first made the beast with two backs (along with other origami creatures) in the first days of January, 1996: Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog: Mad Man Serenades As Lovers Entwine.