A Brooklyn boy moves to the Upper West Side: Now long ago

In 1966, shortly after I started college, my family moved from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to a then-new building. It was built under the states’s Mitchell-Lama urban renewal law that encouraged clearing of tenements and replacement with new buildings. These were not classically “rent-controlled” (like the controls instituted in older buildings post-WWII) but has restrictions on the rent, limiting the profit of the landlords and requiring justification of any rent increase.

I have very good nostalgic memories of my growing up in Brooklyn, in an era far very different from its current status as the hip center of the universe, mostly post-Dodgers and very much pre-Nets (at least in their Brooklyn incarnation). But I never regretted my family’s move to “The City”. As a college student and young adult when I came home for vacations or visits Manhattan, and especially the Upper West Side, was diverse and cultured and exciting in ways that were so different from where I had lived in Brooklyn. I loved coming there, loved walking the streets, day or night (a lot of night as a young man), reveling in the variety of small stores on Broadway, and the fact that the subway was only two short blocks away. And that coming from the subway you could stop for food for dinner from the butcher, baker, fish store, fruit and vegetable store; there were also family-run stores of everything from shoes to jewelry to laundries to delicatessens. And, within a few years of living there, my mother, a kindergarten teacher in the local school, knew most of the families whose children had passed through her class. That was not different from back in Brooklyn, where the same was true for my mother and her “kids” and their families, though there was probably more economic and ethnic diversity in Manhattan. There were (mostly) the same sorts of stores on the shopping streets of Brooklyn, but Broadway had a different feel; it was so intense!

One of the first, and most amazing things, we noted was how many movie theaters were within a few blocks of our house. There were also no multiplexes then, but the Riviera and the Riverside were on the same block of Broadway between 96^th and 97^th streets. The Symphony (now the Symphony Space, but then a movie theater) was on Broadway at 95^th, and in its basement, with an entrance on 95^th, was the Thalia. The Midtown was on Broadway between 99^th and 100^th and the Olympia up at 106^th. The New Yorker was at Broadway and 88^th, and the Loew’s 84^th St was at – 84^th St! There were even more theaters further south on Broadway. So I went to the movies a lot. This was a big change from the Avenue U, 25 cents + 5 cents candy Saturday double features in Brooklyn!

One night in the first summer we were there and I was home from college, 1967, my father and I were walking on Broadway, alive and vibrant at night as Avenue U or even Kings Highway never was. There was a lot of action and people as we approached a Stark’s Coffee Shop, on the corner of 92^nd (or maybe it was 91^st) St. We realized that they were filming a scene from a movie in the coffee shop, and we stopped for a while. I later saw that scene, many times, in the film The Odd Couple, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Indeed, most often at the Thalia, which had an enormous collection of films and played a different double feature every day! You needed to have the printed schedule (no computers!) to keep track of what was coming so you could catch what you wanted to see. Most often, the Odd Couple (1968) was paired with another great film set on the Upper West Side, A Thousand Clowns (1965) with Jason Robards and Martin Balsam. I am sure I saw that double feature multiple times. I recently saw a posting of the Greatest 100 Films of All Time, and neither was on it. I don’t suggest that I am an expert or fit to judge this, but I have my opinions, and if I were compiling the list of the 100 Greatest Films I Have Ever Seen (which, in full disclosure, would not include the majority of the films on that other list), those two would certainly be on it!

The two most-grounded-in-the-neighborhood members of my family were my mother, based both on her role as an early-childhood teacher in one of the local schools and her incredibly warm and engaging personality that made, really, everyone love her, and my youngest sister, who attended public schools through high school on the UWS. Actually, she went to the school right next to our building, while my mother taught at the one 3 blocks away, which was itself closer than my own elementary school in Brooklyn had been to where we lived, demonstrating the density of Manhattan. I mentioned diversity; in terms of race and ethnicity, and even income, it was. I am sure that Sesame Street, beginning about that time, was based on the Upper West Side of the late 1960s. Not only were many ethnic groups represented in the neighborhood and in our building, but unlike in Brooklyn there were many mixed families – not only Italian AND Jewish (the big ethnicities of my old neighborhood) but Irish and Puerto Rican, Black and Polish, and on and on.

Things change in 50+ years. My father, who lived in that building from 1966, died a couple of years ago; it was a rental, not a condo, so we couldn’t buy and keep it. This means lots of people – family (not just immediate but very extended), friends, friends of family and family of friends, no longer have his apartment to stay in while visiting New York. Just as Brooklyn has changed so much I cannot recognize it, so has the Upper West Side. The family-owned stores are mostly gone, and walking on Broadway it seems like most of the stores are the same chains you would see in a suburban shopping mall. But not completely; there are still places to get NY pizza (the BEST!!! No question or comparison!!), if not for 20 cents a slice, and a few delis to get knishes, and a lot of fruit-and-flower stands. But a lot fewer movie theaters. The Thalia (now the Leonard Nimoy Thalia) no longer shows movies; its day as a repository for thousands of films was doomed by DVDs and streaming services. It, and the old Symphony are now Symphony Space, still a cultural center. The Loew’s 84^th St is a multiplex fit for any suburban shopping mall. But there are still a few theaters that regularly play both old and new “art” films (an old term generally equated with “foreign”).

My mother has been gone for decades; even the “new” playground at the school she taught in that had a plaque in dedication to her has been replaced by a newer playground, with no plaque. The Upper West Side is both mallified and gentrified, and also become a destination for young Orthodox Jews, especially Lubavitcher. And, yet, despite the fact that no one with a regular job can afford an apartment, there are still lots of poor people living there, so it remains a diverse community.

So I still have warm memories of both Brooklyn and the Upper West Side  from different parts of my youth. Being a child in Brooklyn was good, and being a young adult in Manhattan was great. It was a much cooler place to bring people I was dating to see; long walks actually took you places – Central Park and Riverside Park and the river and the Boat Basin at 79^th St., and Columbia and Grant’s Tomb and Riverside Church. All those things are still there even if Broadway is full of chain stores.

For my father’s 90^th birthday, we hired a car and driver and went to Brooklyn, starting in Coney Island and heading up to the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg where he grew up. We saw my old neighborhood farther south, my high school and Brooklyn College, and the Ebbetts Field apartments. It was nostalgic, but it was good to get back to Manhattan.

But I actually have no plans to go back to either in the near future; I’ll work off of my memories and don’t need them replaced.

Physician specialists: What's in a name?

 Most of my medical posts are in Medicine and Social Justice (https://medicinesocialjustice.blogspot.com), but this one, although about medicine, is not about social justice and seemed more a musing appropriate to this blog...

 

I had a recent conversation with someone who said that they were looking for a gerontologist for their parents. Since they were talking about a physician, I noted that the correct term is “geriatrician”, one who practices geriatrics; a gerontologist is someone who studies aging but is not a physician. Geriatrician is parallel to pediatrics/pediatrician or obstetrics/obstetrician.

But it is not at all obvious. Indeed, most medical specialties and their physician practitioners follow the “ology/ologist” model: anesthesiology, radiology, neurology, cardiology, and so on. Therefore, it made sense to think a physician caring for older adults might be a gerontologist. But it isn’t.

There are other terms for physicians in other specialties, and I guess you have to know each one. Sort of parallel to geriatrics/gerontology might be psychiatry/psychology, but the physicians who practices psychiatry is a psychiatrist, and psychologists can also be clinical practitioners, if not physicians. Following this psychiatry/psychiatrist model, the specialty that used to be called physical medicine is now called physiatry, and physicians practicing it are physiatrists. The parallel to psychology might be physiology, but physiologists, though they can have MD degrees, are researchers in physical function, not clinicians.

And the physicians who practice orthopedics, which seems similar to geriatrics/pediatrics and obstetrics are called orthopedists, not orthopedicians. The same ending is used for genetics and ethics, geneticist and ethicist, and these can be either physicians or other professionals! The general physician for adults is called an internist, but practices internal medicine, not internics. Internal medicine subspecialists are almost all “ologists” (cardiologists, gastroenterologists, nephrologists, rheumatologists, etc.). And now some internists have become “hospitalists”, based on taking care of only hospitalized patients, and we are also hearing not only the opposite, “ambulists”, but subtypes of hospitalists based on when they work – “nocturnists” and even “weekendists”!

The specialty of family medicine is practiced by family physicians or family doctors; the old terms family practice and family practitioner are no longer used. Of course, there are family nurse practitioners, generalists in the field, compared with pediatric, psychiatric, and adult (not internal medicine) nurse practitioners. Those who do solely women’s reproductive health may be called women’s health or OB-Gyn nurse practitioners, but the nurses trained to deliver babies are nurse-midwives. 

A lot of these names are from Greek and Latin, and sometimes both are used in ways that can be confusing: pediatrics comes from the Greek for child, while podiatrist (a foot doctor, a DPM, not an MD) comes from the same root as pedal, the Latin for foot. Indeed, in anatomy, while the larger bone in the lower leg, the tibia, has a tibial artery, tibial vein, and tibial nerve, the smaller, the fibula (from Latin) has a peroneal artery, vein, and nerve, from the Greek for the same bone! 

I have observed that, while to a health professional, the difference between orthopedics (bones) and orthodontics (straightening teeth) is clear, it is also obvious why these names might be confusing to a regular person. Knowing this stuff as a health professional makes you part of the in-group; knowing it as anyone else means you spend too much time at the doctor's!

You really can’t tell the players without a scorecard!

Traffic, views, noise and crowding: it's all about what you're used to

We all get used to what we get used to, and while a change can make things get better – or worse – for a while, we then get used to the “new normal”. No, I am not particularly talking about the COVID pandemic here, despite what we have become used to the phrase “the new normal” referring to (although anyone is always free to read into what I write whatever grabs them). I have long thought about this in regard to traffic; “too long” is relative to what you expect, not to some abstract standard. I have lived in a number of places, including New York City and Chicago and San Antonio and Kansas City and Tucson. It is a given that the traffic is much worse and slower in those first two, and thus commutes to work could be considered longer. Although, in fairness, I lived much closer to work in the other cities, and, in addition, rarely drove to work or anywhere else in NYC where there is extensive public transit. Plus NYC, having developed (at least until the 1980s) as the US city most like European social democracies had 8-hour days that included a lunch hour, thus the idea of “9 to 5”, where everywhere else I lived (more reactionary, anti-worker, even Chicago) it was 8-5 – 8 hours with an unpaid lunch. This meant I could, when I was young, awaken at 8:15, dress, take the subway, pick up a bagel and coffee downstairs, and be at work by 9. It helped when I was young, and my bedtime was, um, later.

Nonetheless, it was a 45-60 minute drive to work in Chicago from a near-in suburb, as opposed to 15-20 for what was likely the same distance in San Antonio. And yet, to get to my point, it was still possible to be frustrated with traffic. If you think a trip will take you up to an hour and you do it in 50 minutes, that is great, but if you expect it will take 15 minutes and it takes 20 you get frustrated. I always wondered, though, how come Kansas City could not do economically better relative to, say, Chicago, when the people who worked there had about an extra hour and a half less time spent in traffic. One reason, of course, is that people moved farther out (bigger houses for less money), and the other is that they left for work later.

But, as usual, I digress. The point is that you get used to what you get used to, and that includes noise. I spent a good part of my youth on the Upper West Side of NYC where my father lived for over 50 years. It’s noisy there. It’s New York, which is dense and noisy. It is Manhattan, which is denser and noisier. And it was on Amsterdam Avenue, the major northbound truck route in upper Manhattan (since trucks can’t go on the highways on the east or west side). Plus fire engines. You get used to it. You sleep right through it. Even the car alarms which, when they go off, go off for a long time since it is not like the car is in the person’s driveway; their apartment could be blocks away. And the people (often inebriated) screaming in the street. Although it did get better when they replaced the glass with double panes; amazing what a difference it made.

So New York is noisy, and Amsterdam Avenue is noisier, and compared to them Chicago was quieter and so were San Antonio and Kansas City and Tucson. In SA and KC one could hear, and even listen for, the horns of the freight trains coming through at night. But even quieter is the land we have a small cabin on outside Santa Fe. The lots are 15-25 acres of mostly scrub pinyon pine and juniper and overgrazed former ranch land, the views, especially of sunrises and sunsets are spectacular, and for a long time none of the nearby lots (and there aren’t that many) were built on.  The recession of 2008-09 had two big impacts. The first was that people didn’t build for a long time, and we got used to roaming the whole area, wherever we wanted, with our dogs. The second was that the rules for houses got relaxed as the non-profit that originally developed it was desperate to get anyone to buy and build, so the houses are WAY bigger than would have been permitted under the original rules. Someone is building on the lot next door and we thought it was not all that much bigger than our house – until we discovered that was the garage! The house is going up and one can see the cranes and walls from our house.  The lot in the other direction has had a house with a tower for a few years. It is a characteristic that people build on top of rises to get the best views, but of course that makes their houses visible from far away, and they can begin to spoil the landscape. Even if they are architecturally attractive, which most are not. Our house is not in a depression, but just at road height and one story. There are still amazing views of mountains in the distance in almost every direction. And views of the trees, and plants, and birds right here.

But the building makes noise. There are a LOT of pieces of heavy equipment that are needed to build a house, and they come down this unimproved road destroying it, and making a lot of noise. And, of course, the people who are the owners are not here to have their quiet ruined, we are. It is still silent (except for owls and the occasionally coyote) at night, and pretty darn quiet most of the day, when construction isn’t happening. But, you know, you get used to it. To the quiet. So the uncommon car or truck going by kicking up dust makes noise, and the construction equipment even more, and you start to resent it.

And don’t get me started on the small planes making noise overhead…

It is really a pretty quiet, good, and restful life.

Let me add a sunset and sunrise pic: