I squeezed off this photo while awaiting for the crowd to assemble for a Forgotten NY tour across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges in June 2008. Forgotten NY tours were white hot then and I could usually count on between 35-45 tourgoers a pop. Those were the days!
Canal Street is among the noisiest streets in New York City because it’s a major truck route. In the 1960s, NYC traffic czar Robert Moses was thwarted in his attempt to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway connecting the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges to the Holland Tunnel. It would have involved an elevated highway running down Broome Street, not that I would have favored such a thing. (I would have favored a vehicular tunnel under Manhattan connecting the bridges and tunnel.)
With no express roadway, truck traffic employs Canal Street to get from, say, Brooklyn to New Jersey, and NYC drivers, especially truck drivers, are horn happy when they are feeling thwarted or delayed and the sharp, sudden horn noise can be maddening. Canal Street’s small retail businesses, which often involved sidewalk displays, have always attracted large crowds. Unfortunately in recent years, such small businesses have been priced out by rising rents, as Nathan Kensinger relates in a 2018 Canal Street feature in Curbed.
Canal Street sits atop a ditch, or canal, that drained Collect Pond into the Hudson River. The pond, located where today’s Foley Square courthouse neighborhood is today, had become fetid by the Revolutionary War and gave rise to the undesirable Five Points neighborhood. The ditch has been covered since 1819 and the road built over it is Canal Street, so named because “Drainage Ditch Street” is not exactly good public relations.
Some things have changed since 2008. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, one of the most successful mayors in history (as he would tell you) is content these days to fund projects dear to his heart. Not much has been heard from boro prez Scott Stringer since his mayoral bid in 2021 flamed out.
There were portable MPs (music file) players before Apple introduced the IPod in 2001, but it was revolutionary because it could hold thousands of songs in comparison to its tech predecessors the Walkman and Discman, which only played the handful of songs on individual record releases. For example, the IPod I acquired in 2002, and still use as a backup, has 9300 songs on it. Over time, the “cloud” made IPod outdated; I have access to tens of thousands of songs on my IPhone 15 via ICloud. It was truly revolutinary for its time, though. The last IPod Touch was boxed out of the factory in 2022.
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1/8/24
3 comments
Man, from about 1995-2010, NYC was humming! So much good energy. The subways were reasonably clean and safe, and there was a definitely vibe in the air. Then came a new administration and it all went downhill fast. I miss that city.
So do I. I left NYC on good terms in 2005. Suddenly, it was 2014 & & all that was good was replaced by bad & worse. You’ll have another opportunity to make amends in 2025. here’s the motivation:
https://nypost.com/2024/01/09/opinion/eric-adams-is-following-in-the-footsteps-of-past-one-term-nyc-mayors/
Around 2005 I went to buy an MP3 player at the iconic JR music store on Park Row. Even though I had carefully researched the models and knew exactly what I wanted I had to deal with a smarmy salesman, and to actually get one you had to fill out some sort of ticket and wait for the item to be brought out. After something like 45 minutes I gave up and left, which in retrospect was a smart decision because I suspected the salesman wasn’t done with me.
Thankfully my present employer, also know as The World’s Most Hated Company That Everyone Nonetheless Does Business With, has largely rendered those sales practices obsolete.