Page 200 - People & Places In Time

New York City
Barbazon Plaza hotel at 59th & 6th avenue
I left San Francisco Inter- national airport early on a Sunday morning aboard an American DC-10 with perhaps twenty-five people aboard a plane that typi- cally held two hundred or more. We had our choice of seats and a buffet for meals instead of service. Eight hours later I was picking up my luggage in Newark International airline terminal in New Jersey. Next came a shuttle bus through the Lincoln tunnel beneath the Hudson River to Port Authority Bus Termi- nal; then by taxi to the Barbizon Plaza hotel on 59th Street, across
from Central Park. I checked in, then rode the elevator to the seventh floor and my corner room looking down onto Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas). To my left I could look over Central Park toward the skating rink, from the corner window on my right I looked north along Sixth avenue toward the imposing, grey, granite clad CBS building that I recognized from architecture magazines. I turned on the TV and the evening news came on, I looked up toward the CBS building then down to the TV again and thought, I’m looking at the building where the show that I’m watching is being broadcast across the entire country. I realized then, that I was indeed, in New York City.
Somewhat settled into my room, but I was excited to get out for a walk. There was still some late afternoon day light, but it was very cold; a cold I had not felt before, growing up in California. As I walked up 59th street toward Fifth Avenue passing the Plaza Hotel, the sidewalk and streets were dry, but stuffed into the corners and doorways of the buildings was snow remaining from a recent storm. The wind caused the cold air to sting as it passed through the new overcoat I’d bought for this trip . . . I had not brought the proper clothing.
Turning up 5th Avenue I soon was walking past Tiffanies Jewelry, an- other reminder that I’m here. These were the iconic names of places I’d known of, but until now only in movies or books. As I pass them now it’s different, they become real. To walk in Manhattan the energy is palpable, even on a cold Sun- day evening in January. As I continue walking, there was the sense of how this place is become known as the “city that never sleeps”.
Continuing to walk for perhaps an hour or more I eventually found my way back to the hotel . . . my home for the next ten weeks. After all, this was a new start to my life, starting tomorrow. I would need to be at work in the morn- ing, downtown at Drexel Burnham Lambert, somewhere in the heart of Wall Street, in a city I’d never set foot in my life.
Monday morning and another new experience; the subway ride from midtown. I walk down the steps to the underground station, near Broadway and West 57th, about two blocks from the hotel. The ride beneath Broadway would end for me downtown at Wall Street and Broad, near where I would begin
my training to become a stockbroker. A ride I took nearly every morning and evening, five days a week for the next three months. It would become routine, recounting where you were by the names of streets, as they flashed past the subway car windows, printed on the tunnel walls. Once again iconic names you remember, not knowing from where, but familiar just the same; Spring, Canal, Park Place, Barclay Street, Trinity Place, each a little closer to the Wall Street Sta- tion. In short order I learned to fold the Wall Street Journal in such a way as to read it while standing in the train, at the same time holding on to a strap during the thirty-minute ride.
I had walked away from my furniture stores and turned away from architecture and design. This was to be a big change, a new direction in my life.
The stock market had always
held a certain fascination for me, now I would