West Side NYC
Airdate:
Tuesday - December 5, 1972 (Airdate Confirmed)
WOR Show
(Redated from: 11/dd/1972)
(NOTE ABOUT TIME REFERENCES: Since there are many different copies of shows out there from different sources, all time references are from the beginning of one single recorded copy, since various copies, depending on when the recordee started recording, had news at the beginning or shortened themes. The times would vary from copy to copy.)
First Spoken Line After Theme Ends
I knew I'd sneak in on you. . .
Show Description
[ Courtesy: GROK - - ]
Shepherd opens by warning that this is one of the station’s periodic New York nights and that New York is uniquely polarizing—people who have never been there will still argue about it. He then gives a practical geography lesson: avenues run the length of the skinny “pickle-shaped” island (north–south); streets run across it. Broadway is the main spine, starting near the Battery/Wall Street and angling west toward Times Square and beyond. Fifth Avenue, not Broadway, is the official East/West divide; anything west of Fifth is the West Side, though the stretch from Fifth to Broadway near Central Park South is “philosophically” East Side. He notes that even locals argue about where Chelsea or the Village begins.
He praises Central Park as one of the world’s great parks, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted with the foresight that it would one day be surrounded by a dense city. He describes looking down on it from the GM Building at Fifth and 59th, mist over the West Side, the skating rink looking like a Grandma Moses painting.
Neighborhood notes include:
• 14th Street as a historic dividing line (once elegant in the Diamond Jim Brady era).
• Chelsea (around 23rd) and a Greek/Spanish restaurant belt in the teens and twenties.
• Clinton / former Hell’s Kitchen (roughly high 20s to 50th, west of Seventh), once farmland, then docks and rail, later one of the toughest districts; famous gangs were the Dead Rabbits and the Gophers.
• He mocks the romanticized West Side of West Side Story and Wonderful Town as period pieces that never matched the real place.
• Central Park West’s grand old apartment houses (the Dakota, etc.) and the area’s tolerance for eccentrics—one man living with monkeys, parrots, and “gophers” who exercised on a stone balcony in his underwear.
• Upper Broadway in the 70s–80s: old movie palaces converted to food stores whose marquees now advertise produce prices; a densely polyglot, 24-hour neighborhood (he claims a bona-fide Eskimo lived there).
Personal stories: he has lived all over the city; one West Side building he occupied was demolished around him after three burglaries and a two-year lease, replaced by the Equitable building. Radio City was once his “neighborhood theater.” He plugs his new book The Ferrari in the Bedroom (which contains West Side stories) and a Saturday signing at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia.
Interspersed are commercials (General Tire, House of Chan at Seventh and 52nd with 22 chefs cooking to order, Gramercy Park polyester suits) and a mention of live Apollo 17 coverage the next night. He takes calls from Chelsea residents, including one at the Chelsea Hotel and another near Eighth Avenue and 20th, discussing the area’s mix of townhouses, the hotel, and odd architecture (a Gothic Salvation Army building).
He closes by saying 45 minutes is nowhere near enough for such a complex area (Riverside Drive, Amsterdam, West End, Lincoln Center all left untouched) and that visitors who stay only on the East Side are missing New York. The show then hands off to news.
This Show
