Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at two brand-new elements of the cityscape that you can see, beginning today. We’ll also hear from Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, who helped the Knicks win their championship in 1973.
Clint Ramos eventually got around to the what-happened-to-the-glitter-ball issue. First there were the candelabras. “They’ve been calling them candelabras because it’s what they are, technically, right?” Ramos, Lincoln Center’s artist in residence, said. “A filament on a stick.” There are 900 of them, some tall, some taller, some taller still, all slender. They have been installed in the reflecting pool at Lincoln Center for the annual Summer for the City festival, which opens today and will stage hundreds of free and pay-what-you-wish events on the plazas. Ramos, the costume designer for the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of “Tristan und Isolde” and for the Broadway show “Maybe Happy Ending,” used a color scheme that he called “an ode to the ground, to sand and wood.” He said he wanted the candelabras to look like a “glowing oasis in the desert” in the evening. In daylight they are the dullish color of brass. “It had to be brass because they’re in water, and we don’t want rust to start,” he said. He designed a tentlike structure around the fountain, with strips of semisheer voile that undulate overhead. And he had barricades painted gold, to make them seem more welcoming. Barricades are anything but that, he said, but are necessary for crowd control. The big draw for “Summer for the City” has been the dance floor near the fountain, with bands that play everything, like swing, salsa and disco. The dance floor is back, but not the disco ball. “The first year when we had a mirror ball, people said, ‘What are you doing? On top of the fountain?’” Ramos said. “Then, this year, we decided, Oh, we’re not going to do the mirror ball. And people are saying, ‘Where’s the mirror ball? What are you doing?’ A very New York attitude. New Yorkers, I think, as much as we embrace change, we always have to say something about it. It’s not New York if you don’t hear anything.” A piece of music history
In February, when a ceremony was initially scheduled to co-name a block in Greenwich Village “Jimi Hendrix Way,” it snowed nearly 20 inches. “We couldn’t get a flight that was going to go into New York,” Janie Hendrix, younger sister of the music legend, recalled. The ceremony has been rescheduled for today, which she said would have been their father’s 107th birthday. The co-naming will put Hendrix’s name on the block where he lived, at least briefly. It was also where he built Electric Lady Studios, his own personal recording studio. There, he and his friends wouldn’t have to pay by the hour — or have to pack up and leave when they wanted to keep going. “But they did have to rent it out so the mortgage could be paid,” Janie Hendrix said. Eddie Kramer, Jimi Hendrix’s engineer and producer, was “instrumental in talking Jimi into that: ‘When you’re touring or you’re not here, we’ve got to pay the bills.’ Jimi totally understood that.” There were early bookings by Carly Simon, Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder, and as the critic Lindsay Zoladz noted in 2024, Electric Lady Studios has survived ownership changes and upheavals in recording technology. West Eighth Street, once the most with-it block in the Village, changed as the counterculture mood faded amid gentrification. “I hear there’s a massage therapist place” there now, she said. “Might try it out.” The ceremony this morning will serve as the kickoff for an educational partnership with TeachRock, a nonprofit started by the guitarist and actor Stevie Van Zandt. He used Electric Lady Studios for “Sun City,” an anti-apartheid benefit single recorded in the 1980s featuring stars like Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Lou Reed, Keith Richards and Run-DMC. Van Zandt learned the hard way that Electric Lady Studios “was built on an underground river, which nobody warned him about,” he said, referring to Hendrix. For “Sun City,” he said, “I had 32 reels of tape times 24 tracks each, and had to mix that down to two tracks. Then the river reared its ugly head, and we lost the mix after two weeks of work.” Janie Hendrix said it had taken time to get the recognition for her brother. “We started soon after Jimi passed away” in 1970, when he was 27. “We used to have a petition in Electric Lady Studios to sign that said, ‘Name this street after Jimi,’ and it seemed to go nowhere. We also tried to get Jimi’s face on a stamp, and that eventually happened, 12 years ago. All in due time.” WEATHER Expect mostly cloudy skies, possible showers and thunderstorms later in the day and a high near 78. Tonight, clouds and rain are likely to continue as temperatures slip to 72. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until June 19 (Juneteenth). QUOTE OF THE DAY “We will be putting in for every grant and loan we could possibly get. “We need billions of dollars.” — Andy Byford, the executive overseeing the planned $7 billion renovation of Pennsylvania Station for Amtrak, which owns the station. The latest New York news
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With the Knicks in the N.B.A. finals, some of the most fascinating reading has been about famous players from past championship teams. Last week my colleague Matt Flegenheimer watched Bill Bradley watching Game 1. Now David Waldstein has caught up with Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, who helped the Knicks win in 1973. More than half a century later, after more than 40 surgeries, it’s clear that Monroe is paying the price for a Hall of Fame career. But he did not want to talk about the unrelenting pain that makes him fidget in search of the most comfortable position, if there is one. He wanted to talk about a charter school in the Bronx. The statistics from the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School have been impressive. Monroe said that 75 percent of the roughly 40 students come from single-parent homes, and 15 percent live in homeless shelters. He pointed out that last year’s graduating class, the school’s first, had a 100 percent college acceptance rate. When they arrived, those students had an average reading level five grades below that of their age group. And then there are the Knicks. Monroe has been mesmerized by the current squad, particularly the point guard Jalen Brunson. And he is happy for his grandson to finally experience that particular Knicks euphoria. “This city doesn’t rock unless the Knicks are doing it,” Monroe said. “As great as all the other teams are, this is the Knicks’ town.” METROPOLITAN DIARY Huge piece
Dear Diary: I was at the West Fourth Street station waiting for a train. A man laboriously trundled what appeared to be an enormous and elaborately wrapped piece of furniture the length of the platform until he stopped next to me. As he set the huge piece down, wiping sweat from his brow, all kinds of things went through my head. But I realized that even for a jaded native New Yorker like me, this might be a first: a guy dragging his sofa down to the subway. As soon as he started to unwrap the item with great ceremony, I realized I had been mistaken. It was an upright piano. He made an even greater production of positioning it just so, producing a stool from somewhere and folding his packing material away neatly. He then held his hands high above the keyboard in anticipation of playing what I expected would be a ponderous chord. But no sooner had he completed these elaborate preparations than the unmistakable warble of a saxophone came pealing from somewhere across the tracks. He and I heaved a huge sigh in unison the moment we recognized the melody: “Killing Me Softly With His Song.” There was nothing more to be said. — Deborah Frost Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
