The Nostalgia Factor

I have always seemed to have it. The nostalgia factor. As a kid I loved the section in the Sunday Daily News magazine that showed 'New York's Changing Scene.' Featured were photos of what a corner of Manhattan looked at in say the 1920s, or 1930s, and what the same corner now looked like in the 1950s and 60s. Some buildings remained, other didn't, and usually stores were different. There was a bit of text, by Margot Gayle, who I later learned was behind the effort to keep the feature going as long as she could. She was several months past her 100th birthday when she passed away in 2008. She rates her own Wikipedia entry: She was a was an American historic preservationist and author who helped save the Victorian cast-iron architecture in New York City's SoHo district.

I used to cut these 'Changing Scene' pages out and put them in a folder. I used my own Brownie camera to take pictures and expected to come back decades later to record what the area looked like. That never happened.

I remember well the old Penn Station and understand why there are those who have never gotten over its demolition. It almost seems as if the MTA is trying to make it reappear. The girders at the Jamaica Station are styled to evoke the old station. The fairly new New Jersey Transit section of Penn Station is created to look a bit like the old pile. There are tiled touches that bring back memories to those old enough to realize what the designers were working from.

The old Penn Station is so missed that a fairly recent movie, 'Broken City,' finds Mark Wahlberg tailing a campaign honcho and buying a round-trip ticket to Montauk! at Grand Central Terminal. The MTA will be glad to know that the East Side tunnel project has been completed a few years ahead of schedule. At least in the movies.

So, when the NYT runs a 'Building Block' piece on the Hotel Carter, at 250 West 43rd Street and describes how the new  management is trying to upgrade the staying experience, I'm at attention.

Will the writer get to the part that the place was once the Hotel Dixie and used to have Adirondack Trailways buses leave from its garage? Bless their heart, they did.

It's rather amazing that Penn Station was torn down, but the Hotel Dixie/Hotel Carter stays with us. It's the unfairness of things like that that drive the preservationists nuts.

You need old pictures and old movies to see what the place looked like. I love seeing Tom Ewell make his way through the upper level with a badly wrapped canoe paddle headed for the vacationing family in Maine, with his virtue intact at the end of 'The Seven Year Itch.' We see some of the grand steps when Farley Granger scampers down them to buy a ticket in the appropriately named, 'Strangers on a Train.'

When the 24 story place was the Hotel Dixie there a few summers in the early, to mid-50s that my mother took me there to get on a Trailways Adirondack bus to take the 12 hour trip to Malone, New York, before the Thruway, to see a nursing friend of hers from WW II. Gracie lived on a farm in nearby Brushton with her husband and daughter Judy, who was only a year or so younger than me.

The Port Authority was yet to be built, and the other bus stations in Manhattan were the two Greyhound bus stations, one across Penn Station on 33rd Street, and another I think in the upper 40s on the West Side.

The reporter, David Dunlap, gets in some of these early details of the Dixie, before it morphed into the Carter and was basically a welfare hotel. The bus station that was part of the Dixie used a turntable to turn the buses around, so they could head back out. There weren't many buses, but the place was busy.

I used to get a kick out of the fact that there in Manhattan was a place called Dixie, and my mother and I were headed to see her friend who was originally from Tennessee and who sounded like Patsy Kline.

The Dixie was a decent place to stay, and because of the bus station, was a destination for many. There is a scene in the 1960 Tony Curtis, Debbie Reynolds movie, 'The Rat Race,' where musician Tony gets to town and can't afford the $7.00 a night! it's going to cost to stay at the Dixie. He winds up staying up Debbie Reynolds, sharing an apartment. Only in the movies.

The Dixie morphed into the Carter, and basically fell into stages of being a welfare hotel, beset with crime, hookers and drugs. I used to think the neon sign on the top of the building, Hotel Carter, should be spelled Hotel Crater. The sign is still there, a fairly identifiable piece of the New York skyline.

Malone and Brushton is a farming community, a long, long way from New York City. It's near the Canadian border, but near Potsdam, where I started college. Downstate talk is not part of their world. It was only much later in life when I saw the movies 'Billy Bathgate' and 'Bugsy' did I learn that Bugsy Siegel was once held in prison in Malone.

Milking, cows and farming were the topics of conversation at the dinner table. And Eisenhower.

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