The Heat Is On

In the prior reprise—a blast from the past—I recount navigating my way home from high school after a final exam. Perhaps even the final final—a New York State Regents Algebra exam—of my freshman year. I remembered it was a hazy, hot, and humid mid-June afternoon. The air quality was extremely poor and the sky a greenish-yellow overcast. On the last leg of my journey, I spied a flash of heat lightning—no thunder accompaniment  lightning—on the distant horizon beyond the High Pumping Station off Jerome Avenue. As Bronx architecture goes, this building is rather distinct. Built at the turn of the twentieth century—as an appendage of the Jerome Park Reservoir system—it is listed on, of all places, the National Register of Historic Places. With its red bricks and precipitously steep and slate-covered gable roof, which is not too common in the area, the High Pumping Station has always been an eye-catcher. Anyway, that was a memory blip from a June day forty-four years ago. In that momentary snapshot in time the heat lightning served as a welcome beacon, a portent of better things to come—for a couple of months at least.

Fast forward to the present and the heat is on once more. However, I’m not banking on any of Mother Nature’s natural phenomena—signs from the heavens—lighting the way for the coming summer season. Instead, New York City voters, including yours truly, cast ballots in the first consequential election with ranked-choice voting. I had forgotten that we the people said yay to ranked-choice voting by a margin of three-to-one in 2019. Honestly, I don’t think very many of us considered the potential consequences of this new way of electing office holders. While it makes sense in a lot of ways, leave it to the city’s Board of Elections to royally screw things up. With so many men and women on both the left and right believing our elections are corrupted nowadays, this is awfully bad timing. Apparently, the Board of Elections counted 135,000 test ballots in the first round of ranked-choice tabulations, which skewed the results. The bureaucratic tangle of an agency has since announced a do-over.

Riddle me this: If frontrunner Eric Adams, who was up by ten points in the actual tally on election night, somehow loses this substantial lead in the ranked-choice tabulations, will it be accepted as absolutely aboveboard? Adams got a plurality of votes in four of the city’s five boroughs. Only Manhattan demurred, giving “Defund the Police” Maya Wiley the most votes. Her core support was in the more upscale white neighborhoods. From voters who love to talk the woke talk from their door-manned buildings, their vacation homes in the Hamptons, and while consuming lobster gazpacho, chicken tikka basmati rice, and nori seaweed tots in trendy, hipster restaurants. Just sayin’.

While on the subject of just sayin’: There are more cars on the streets than ever before. Traffic time never takes a holiday. It’s not just the rush hours and the Friday evening exoduses anymore. Add to this mayhem countless variations of motor bikes, mopeds, and illegal ATVs. Traversing the highways and byways is a nightmare night and day. Crime is also spiraling out of control and it’s hot as hell on top of that. Looking on the bright side: It’s not as toasty as in the Pacific Northwest with its heat dome plus climate change one-two punch wreaking havoc on the animate and inanimate alike.

So, yes, while the talk the talkers will throw their full support behind things like the Green New Deal—without fretting over the fine print or even reading the fine print—are they willing to make any personal sacrifices, adjustments to their lifestyles? Sitting amidst an all-too-typical traffic jam—with my taxi driver alerting me that his outdoor thermometer reading is one hundred degrees—I think I know the answer to that question.

 

Summer Daze

(Originally published on June 23, 2017)

Once upon a time, I relished summer days and nights. The heat and humidity one-two punch didn’t faze me. No temperature or relative clamminess was too high to prevent a stickball game. In fact, playing on searing asphalt during a scorcher—sans water—was par for the course. There was no such thing as individual bottled water in the 1970s! Sure, the gang could have brought along a cooler, thermos, or canteen to games, but it just wasn’t on our radars. Looking back, we sometimes played doubleheaders in ninety-five-degree heat without liquid pick-me-ups. After game two, we were a parched lot in a mad-dash search for a non-contaminated watering hole—tap water from the kitchen sink or powdered iced tea. What American TV western didn’t feature its protagonists short of water and in a do-or-die hunt for it in super-dry desert climes?

Ah, but summer days just aren’t what they once were to me. It's more like summer daze. This week, the calendar officially said that it was summer with the longest days of the year upon us. As a youth in the third week of June, I was uber-active in the great outdoors until the last sliver of daylight disappeared. Now, I spend well-lit summer evenings inside and do all that I can to circumvent the infamous New York City heat and humidity. Air conditioning certainly has its place. For me, there is no more stoop sitting and chewing the fat with neighbors on poor Air Quality Index (AQI) days and nights. I don't recall whether or not the AQI was calculated in the good old days. However, I can say that the air quality in the 1970s was considerably worse than it is today.

Bad air notwithstanding, the summers of my youth found the Good Humor man turning up every night at around the same time. Good Humor’s cola-flavored Italian ice—a favorite of mine—was a rock-solid frozen block. In attempting to sliver off pieces of the ice with the tongue-depressor spoon supplied, its paper cup would get punctured beyond recognition. Actually, the only cola taste—if you could call it that—of their watery Italian ices was found at the bottom of the paper cups, which by then would be sorry casualties of war. But what did we expect for twenty cents? They were worth every penny.

Summertime also meant a vacation on the seashore of New Jersey or Long Island. It meant day trips to the happening hot spots incessantly advertised on the New York City metropolitan area airwaves, like the Brigantine Castle—a haunted fortress on the Atlantic in Brigantine, New Jersey. A three-hour drive trip from the Bronx to the Brigantine Castle was a memorable summertime adventure. The equivalent for my peers’ kids today—on the satisfaction front, I'd say—would be two weeks in the South of France or Swiss Alps.

A final summertime footnote and memory from forty years ago. It’s the solitary snapshot kind not associated with anything monumental. I had completed a high school final exam during my freshman year. It was an afternoon in mid-June 1977. I was alone and on my way home via mass transit—from the East Bronx to the West Bronx. Standing at a bus stop on Jerome Avenue across the street from two of the ugliest-looking buildings in the borough—Tracey Towers—I patiently waited for the BX1, which would take me on the last leg of my journey home. It was overcast, dreadfully humid, and I remember seeing lightning on the distant horizon—heat lightning, I think. This far-away hot flash nonetheless signified so much to me—school’s end, summer, and a couple of months of incredible bliss.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

A Shore Thing

With this being the first full day of summer, I thought I’d revisit the family vacations of my youth. Many of them were spent on the Jersey Shore as it was and is affectionately known. For countless working-class New York City families in those days gone by, this considerable slice of shoreline was heaven. Initially, my family stayed in small cottages in the town of Manasquan on streets named after fish, like Whiting, Pike, and Trout. In the late-1960s and early-1970s, weekly rentals set the folks back $75 to $100, bargains considering they were a few blocks away from both the Atlantic Ocean and the Manasquan Inlet, a busy boating thoroughfare that provided never-ending entertainment for kids, like me. It was a huge deal walking over to the inlet in the morning, where we would watch the fishing fleet from Point Pleasant—on the opposite shore—head out to sea. They would subsequently return with their catches, sometimes showing them off to land-bound spectators, including spellbound boys and girls. The flocks of seagulls inevitably trailing their crafts were likewise mesmerized.

In that colorful snapshot in time, cottages in a particular part of town were occupied by hard-partying hippies. Ever a source of fascination to little me, there was something so summery about the wafting smell of Mary Jane commingling with the ubiquitous sea breeze. Manasquan, too, had an extensive boardwalk, which was mostly asphalt as I recall. The houses along it were out of my folks’ price range, but I always wished we could stay in one of them. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy’s destruction in 2012, those very homes’ front porches now have a bird’s-eye view of tall sand dunes, not the mercurial Atlantic.

At some point in the mid-1970s, there were no rentals available in Manasquan for the weeks of my father’s vacation. We ended up venturing a little south to a place called Lavallette, a cozy vacation spot on a barrier island with the ocean to the east and Barnegat Bay to the west. Granted, the Manasquan Inlet was a big loss, but Lavallette’s boardwalk was a boardwalk from beginning to end. There also was this great bakery in town, Kay’s, which supplied us with breakfast donuts galore. Eating four glazed donuts was a piece of cake in those days. Lavallette also had a takeout pizza restaurant, The Oven, which produced a tasty pie. Not too far away was The Pizza Parlor, where the wait for pies at dinnertime was hours. It served superb thin pizza and was worth the wait. On one occasion we had visitors at our summer rental and The Pizza Parlor supplied the fare, including a pie with anchovies—my father’s idea. As expected—by me at least—the plain pies were consumed with alacrity while one too many anchovy slices languished in a box. And I could have eaten another slice or two, I remember. Upon learning this and that I was not a fan of anchovies, a visitor—a burly Italian patriarch—rather curtly told me, “Just take them off!” No can do! Anchovies leave their mark.

In the waning years of vacations on the Jersey Shore, we landed in the town of Ortley Beach, just south of Lavallette, which was totally decimated by Superstorm Sandy, I learned. The house we rented there a couple of times would get flooded during a summer thunderstorm. Ortley Beach also bordered Seaside Heights with its boardwalk of more than just boards. It was a nice place to visit with its amusements, entertainment, and foods, but I wouldn’t want to live there. The one and only time I ever was on a log flume was on the Seaside Heights boardwalk. A relative of mine once sniffed at her time spent on Cape Cod, calling it “boring” compared to the Jersey Shore with its electrifyingly exciting boardwalks. I thought that odd. But maybe not for a person with an Attention Deficit Disorder. Whatever, I remember fondly my time spent on the Jersey Shore with its boardwalks, where no two were the same.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)