Some Like It Hot

It occurred to me the other day that there was a decade that was hotter than the 1960s in New York. The 1950s.

This thought hit me as I was browsing through the photos on exhibit at last week's Park Avenue Armory show for the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD). Many black and white photos, mostly from the usual famous fine art photographers: Ansel Adams, Weegee, Berenice Abbot, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, to name only a few. Seventy different dealers in nicely laid-out booths on the armory floor.

In one dealer's booth, not prominently placed on an inside corner wall, was what might be a familiar picture to some of us: Marilyn Monroe standing on a sidewalk subway ventilation grate in a scene from the 1955 movie, 'The Seven Year Itch.'

Marilyn's clothing was of the era--a dress. Marilyn was the era. At least the female movie portion of it. In the scene, she's catching a breeze from a passing subway train below the sidewalk grate. The breeze gently lifts her dress and cools her off, while at the same time heating up the carnal hearts of male viewers in the movie's crew, passersby, and eventually movie viewers.

I don't remember the gallery that had the photo, or the photographer that took it. It wasn't the usual full-front shot that is familiar to many, but was somewhat off to the side of Marilyn's left and slightly behind her. Nothing is lost because of the angle.

Besides an opportunity to show off Marilyn's legs, the point of the scene is to emphasize that it is so hot in the summer in New York City that a girl's got to get cooled off somehow, so standing on top of a subway grate waiting for a train to pass beneath is one way to accomplish getting cooler.

The movie is a comedy, a romantic comedy, I guess, that basically shows that air-conditioning, and the lack of air-conditioning during a New York 1950s summer can lead to adultery. If allowed to. It is hot out there, in there, and it's hard to get cool. It's a decade hotter than the 1960s.

It's a classic movie that takes place in an even then sub-divided New York brownstone, pitting an executive's (Tom Ewell) fantasies against reality.  I've always liked the movie, one because it reminds me of the time a neighbor asked my father if he had ever gotten the Seven Year Itch. I don't remember what my father told the neighbor, and at the time, I didn't understand the question one bit.

Another reason for liking the movie of course is Marilyn Monroe, who is still easy to look at. I can remember several women in the neighborhood who tried their best to copy her look. Sorry Mrs. Trampler, after the first, there is no other.

Marilyn is still missed. I was somewhere in puberty, progressing through being a teenager, when she committed suicide in 1962, and I still haven't gotten over it, despite being told by several that I should.

But certainly the most architectural reason to view the movie is that at the end of the film it gives you one of the few opportunities where you can see the upper level of New York's old Pennsylvania Station, as Tom Ewell races to catch a train to join his vacationing family in Maine, (where of course it is cooler), all the while clumsily carrying a half-wrapped kayak paddle, but with his virtue intact.

I miss the old Penn Station too.

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