Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing
Speaker 1: Today's guest and I crossed paths once before, some twenty
Speaker 1: years ago. In two thousand one, I took my only
Speaker 1: foray into directing movies. Matthew Landfield was just out of college,
Speaker 1: visiting his parents in a dilapidated building on disposed the
Speaker 1: Street in Lower Manhattan that turned out to be part
Speaker 1: of our set. I remember you being outside on Dispersed
Speaker 1: the street with Um, was it Jennifer Love HEWITTT? So
Speaker 1: you guys were outside. I remember the grip and electric
Speaker 1: guys come up the stairs and they had to run.
Speaker 1: Some lighting came up through my mom's getting window. Um.
Speaker 1: You spent more time with my dad that day that
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get to that. Maybe I should have been
Speaker 1: looking at the dailies. Like I said, it was my
Speaker 1: only attempt at directing. But Matthews dad, Ronnie Landfield, was
Speaker 1: like someone out of a New York past. He was
Speaker 1: a modernist painter who had raised a family there starting
Speaker 1: in the seventies. Gentrification didn't really begin in Trabecca until
Speaker 1: after nine eleven, much later than in neighboring Soho. When
Speaker 1: we were shooting. Ronnie's block was just an Italian restaurant
Speaker 1: and a row of former industrial buildings. In those buildings,
Speaker 1: dozens of people like him made their homes and their studios.
Speaker 1: Ronnie invited me upstairs to see his paintings. He was
Speaker 1: a character with his cigarettes and a bronx accent. I
Speaker 1: thought had died off punching consonants like they were sunny liston.
Speaker 1: I wanted to quit my movie and start a new
Speaker 1: one about him. Dustin Hoffman would play the lead. The
Speaker 1: whole scene stuck with me over the decades, and a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago, I found myself driving down the
Speaker 1: same block. The building at thirty one Dispross was gone,
Speaker 1: an empty lot. Instead, I searched the address, hoping I
Speaker 1: might find what would replace it. What I found instead
Speaker 1: was a brilliant, lyrical, almost obsessively researched, eight thousand word
Speaker 1: essay about that single plot of Earth. It's called Requiem
Speaker 1: for a Living City, and it's the story of thirty
Speaker 1: one disprosus for ten thousand years. And who was the
Speaker 1: author of this epic tale none other than Ronnie Landfield's son, Matthew.
Speaker 1: You know my mom and that were probably some of
Speaker 1: the earlier people to move into Tribeca, a couple of
Speaker 1: their families that were already there. I didn't come along
Speaker 1: until another five six seven years later I was born six.
Speaker 1: There was no school, there was the whole foods. No,
Speaker 1: there's no there thing. There was nothing down there were
Speaker 1: should go get the groceries. So we would go to
Speaker 1: the West Village. There was a grocery store called the
Speaker 1: Pioneer on Bleaker Street that we would have to walk to,
Speaker 1: and there was another place called Morgan's on West Broadway
Speaker 1: which to get the grocery had little house on street.
Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds crazy, but at that time it
Speaker 1: was like living in a pioneer lifestyle in the middle
Speaker 1: of this urban wilderness. It has a group on a farm.
Speaker 1: It was like that. So what happened with the school,
Speaker 1: I guess a school called PS three Annex was opened
Speaker 1: by a pioneering principal woman named Blossom Galertner, and she
Speaker 1: was very progressive. She had a very kind of open
Speaker 1: minded perspective and education, and she opened a school inside
Speaker 1: of Independence Plausit which was a large housing development. Tiny
Speaker 1: little school, but um in those days there were so
Speaker 1: few children that the city didn't want didn't want to
Speaker 1: keep the school open, and and a lot of the residents,
Speaker 1: including my mother, had to fight the city to keep
Speaker 1: a school in that area of Tribeca. So in the
Speaker 1: film Pollock, you probably know the ad Harriston, there's a
Speaker 1: scene where, you know, uh Pollock and Lee Krasner are
Speaker 1: are talking in and he says, hey, let's make a
Speaker 1: baby and she says, no, you know, you need and
Speaker 1: you need and you need, and uh she she turns
Speaker 1: him down because they don't have any money. He's kind
Speaker 1: of crazy. Yeah, he's you know, he's got all and
Speaker 1: so no, look, my dad is not Jackson Pollock and
Speaker 1: my mom was not Lee Krasner, but they faced a
Speaker 1: lot of the same issues, a lot of the same challenges.
Speaker 1: You know. They they didn't have a lot of money.
Speaker 1: They were My dad grew up in the Bronx. He
Speaker 1: was just basically just a working class kid. And my
Speaker 1: mom was um raised by a single mother and the
Speaker 1: the East Side. My grandmother was an artist, so she
Speaker 1: never had any money either, and so my mother was
Speaker 1: very lived about, very bohemian life. Um. I was going
Speaker 1: to show you a picture later of of one of
Speaker 1: class Oldenburg's Happenings with My mother was one of the
Speaker 1: cast members of of one of those those performance aren't
Speaker 1: kind of thing. She was a performer, dancer. Where did
Speaker 1: they meet. I think they met in woodstock folk dancing
Speaker 1: or something that that was the Was your father into
Speaker 1: that too? Yeah? They were all into that in those
Speaker 1: early sixties. Yeah. Yeah. If you wanted to meet a
Speaker 1: woman that you were attracted to right away, you were
Speaker 1: into whatever. She was into it. Oh yeah, I'm into
Speaker 1: that dancing. I was sure, I do that all the time.
Speaker 1: I know that deal. Yeah. My my my ex wife
Speaker 1: said to me, I'm a vegetarian. I said, so am
Speaker 1: I that's so funny. I had a hamburger like three
Speaker 1: hours ago. I was like, anyway, so there. So she
Speaker 1: was a performer. So my mom, my mom had been
Speaker 1: a performer. She had a clothing store with my grandmother
Speaker 1: for a little while in the East village. But you know,
Speaker 1: my mother and my father got together in the sixties,
Speaker 1: and um my, my father at the time was sort of,
Speaker 1: like I wanted to say, like an alfontrib of of
Speaker 1: art in a way, like he was very young compared
Speaker 1: to so many of his compatriots. But he was very
Speaker 1: ambitious and very for success, very very driven, and his
Speaker 1: pace exactly um. But you know, like succeeding in the
Speaker 1: art world is was is never easy, even if you
Speaker 1: are coming at it with with lots of resources and
Speaker 1: support from family, money and all kinds of things, and
Speaker 1: might didn't have any of that. He had to fight
Speaker 1: his own family to become an artist. Now what does
Speaker 1: dad do? A delivery man? And he was a working
Speaker 1: classic working class And the grandmother that had the apartment
Speaker 1: of Chelsea was whose mother that was my mother's mother.
Speaker 1: My mother's father was an artist also, he was a
Speaker 1: graphic artist. He and his brothers had been They were
Speaker 1: born in Savannah, Georgia, all of them, there were four
Speaker 1: of them, but their mother moved them back to Lithuania
Speaker 1: as children and so like in the nine twenties and
Speaker 1: thirties they lived in Lithuania and they had a very
Speaker 1: very very difficult time there and then when they left,
Speaker 1: their mother stayed and died in the Holocaust. So my grandfather,
Speaker 1: my grandfather and his brothers were extraordinarily talented in the arts.
Speaker 1: They were and they were uh, cartoonists and draw drawers,
Speaker 1: basically illustrators. My My grandfather's brother is a cartoonist known
Speaker 1: by the name of Val Jaffee who does the foldings um,
Speaker 1: and my grandfather worked with him for a little while
Speaker 1: doing cartoons. But um, my grandfather was was I think
Speaker 1: a little more fragile than al was. And and um
Speaker 1: never really recovered from the loss of his mother in
Speaker 1: the Holocaust, and so uh he he uh struggled with
Speaker 1: depression and basically PTSD for all of my mother's childhood
Speaker 1: and wasn't around. And so my mother was raised by
Speaker 1: my grandmother and her grandparents in uh in Florest Hills
Speaker 1: and whatnot. So um, but I want to get back
Speaker 1: to your parents. They were sort of like these kind
Speaker 1: of you mean kids just kind of on their own.
Speaker 1: And my mom was very devoted to my father, and
Speaker 1: my father was very determined and he uh, she was
Speaker 1: very devoted to your phone. She lived under these I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't want to describe it like it was that tough.
Speaker 1: But was the place warm was did they turn the
Speaker 1: heat on? Sometimes that's what kids so you say, the
Speaker 1: politic reference and the like, you know, don't we gonna
Speaker 1: get out of here? Or was there was she was
Speaker 1: she down the line, she was with him. She was.
Speaker 1: And but you know, neither my parents graduate from college.
Speaker 1: My father attended art school for a short time and
Speaker 1: decided that wasn't gonna crap. No, he was. He actually
Speaker 1: went to the Kansas City Artist Too for a little while,
Speaker 1: but decided that, you know, all he really wanted to
Speaker 1: do was paint, So he came back to New York
Speaker 1: and and went into painting. My mother, uh didn't didn't
Speaker 1: didn't finish her college education. And I think that that
Speaker 1: was something that she may be regretted over over time
Speaker 1: and sort of was you know, she's of a generation
Speaker 1: of women where that was not as important to typical right,
Speaker 1: and and so, um, did your dad have a gallery
Speaker 1: that represented him back then? Do you do you have
Speaker 1: some success right away? He did. He in the in
Speaker 1: the in the late sixties. He was right in there
Speaker 1: with a lot of of important painters and sculptors who
Speaker 1: were doing I love your dad's painting. Oh good, I'm
Speaker 1: sure he would love to hear you say that. You know,
Speaker 1: he was. Things were working. Yeah. By the time I
Speaker 1: came along, my dad had already dealt a reputation in
Speaker 1: the art world, was selling his paintings pretty regularly. And
Speaker 1: their housing was affordable, which is important for your career
Speaker 1: for an artist. That's everything. So I come along, and
Speaker 1: then my brother comes along, and then what happens in
Speaker 1: seventy nine, actually when the year that you you came
Speaker 1: to New York, the rent was tripled and and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, um, this manageable life becomes a little
Speaker 1: bit more difficult. And my my dad still continued through
Speaker 1: the early eighties to have success in the art, in
Speaker 1: the arts, selling his work, but it was, it became harder.
Speaker 1: It just was harder. And of course you have a family,
Speaker 1: have two children, and getting more expensive, things are more challenging,
Speaker 1: and so you know, uh, it was. It was not.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't. I would not say that their life was
Speaker 1: a panacea. It was. It was a challenge. It was
Speaker 1: always difficult. Um. And he last there how much longer?
Speaker 1: I mean they lived there until two thousand and twelve,
Speaker 1: two thousand and twelves. So when I saw him, because
Speaker 1: I want to paint this picture quickly before I forget,
Speaker 1: which is and again this is where you're really going
Speaker 1: to correct me if I'm wrong, because when I tell
Speaker 1: this story, I always turned your father into like a
Speaker 1: dustin Hoppin character, and Dustin Hoppin would play your father.
Speaker 1: He doesn't have a very very New York accent, correct,
Speaker 1: because I play him like he's had a really thick
Speaker 1: New York accent. You know. Um my wife would say
Speaker 1: that he does, but he doesn't. Really like there's certain
Speaker 1: words that he In my movie version of this, your
Speaker 1: dad is a really super thick New York he smoked.
Speaker 1: Because remember this is my Remember this is one I remember.
Speaker 1: I'm standing out in front of this building and your
Speaker 1: dad shows up. It's freezing cold, and I'm sitting there
Speaker 1: and he starts talking to me. He goes, you're making
Speaker 1: a movie here. And I'm like, yeah, we're making it.
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, you're Alan Bowin, right, you were like
Speaker 1: an actor, right. I'm like, yeah, I'm directed this. But
Speaker 1: he was like, yeah, yeah, you're living. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I live here with my wife. I'm a painter. And
Speaker 1: he lights a cigarette and I go, you got an
Speaker 1: extra cigarette on it. And I love when people look
Speaker 1: at me like you're a rich movie star and you're
Speaker 1: bumming a cigarette off from me and I'm living in
Speaker 1: this loft and this grocer street. Sure, okay, I'll give
Speaker 1: a smoke. Here we go, and I'm sitting there smoking
Speaker 1: a cigarette with your father on the street, and and
Speaker 1: and just something happened to me. I'm like, I gotta
Speaker 1: live in this building. I want to live in there.
Speaker 1: I want to get a whole floor of this building.
Speaker 1: I want to have a con section of this building
Speaker 1: to myself. And I'm gonna blow it all up and
Speaker 1: fix it all up. But um, he lasted till two
Speaker 1: thousand and twelves. I mean they basically they were forced
Speaker 1: to Hurricane Andy, really kind of Sandy. Where were you
Speaker 1: at the time. I was living in Brooklyn with my face.
Speaker 1: You've never left the city, have you? It was in college,
Speaker 1: but I haven't lived in other places. Where'd you go again?
Speaker 1: I went to college in Vermont at a place called
Speaker 1: Middlebury College. I love Biddleburgh. He went to middle for
Speaker 1: four years, four years. What did you study? I studied theater.
Speaker 1: I studied filmmaking, geography, Uh, you know, arrangement, mostly acting,
Speaker 1: mostly theater, mostly film. What do you want to do?
Speaker 1: I wanted to be an actor when I got out
Speaker 1: of school, and then a filmmaker, which is what you're
Speaker 1: doing now, which is what I do now now. So
Speaker 1: two thousand, he leaves only because so he would have stayed.
Speaker 1: There have been many years of legal battles with the landlord,
Speaker 1: and you know, you know, they had basically been living
Speaker 1: with the specter of eviction from seventy nine until, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole the whole time they were there. Eventually, though,
Speaker 1: their their place was rent stabilized. Everyone in the building,
Speaker 1: their their units were rent stabilized, and they had a
Speaker 1: right to stay. So then the storm comes. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so in Sandy, you know, and my my father's studios
Speaker 1: on the ground floor, and you know, my father, being
Speaker 1: who he is, it's a little bit crazy. They stayed
Speaker 1: in the building. They were there the whole, the whole time.
Speaker 1: They did not evacuate. He did didn't want to leave
Speaker 1: his work, He didn't want to leave the place. So
Speaker 1: he witnessed the whole neighborhood flood. Where did you go?
Speaker 1: They went up to some of the upper levels of
Speaker 1: the building because other folks, your father in my Destin
Speaker 1: Huffin movie, he's smoking, I'm not leaving. Everybody else's leaving.
Speaker 1: I'm not going anywhere. You're pretty much right, That's exactly
Speaker 1: how he was. He said. The lights went out, Um,
Speaker 1: the cars, the cars flooded up to almost the roof
Speaker 1: of the cars, and um, you know that was like
Speaker 1: that for about three hours and then the water went away.
Speaker 1: And you know that part of the city is in
Speaker 1: a tidal estuary. The basement of our building would flood
Speaker 1: a lot over over the many years because it was
Speaker 1: landfill and it was technically part of the river and so, uh,
Speaker 1: that wasn't a surprise to him. But the flooding in
Speaker 1: the street was he had never seen. Then. I asked
Speaker 1: him the other day about it, and he said, never, ever, ever, ever, ever,
Speaker 1: in the forty three years of their life, there had
Speaker 1: he ever seen flooding. That that was the big one
Speaker 1: like that, that was that was interesting how people who
Speaker 1: don't know that about landfill and and maybe you know
Speaker 1: this because your article speaks to a lot of that history,
Speaker 1: which I am not mistaken. Just as excavated material from
Speaker 1: the World Trade Center was responsible for some of the
Speaker 1: build out of Battery Park, absolutely, it was excavation from
Speaker 1: the subway system that built out some of Rebecca correct
Speaker 1: or no, no, no. Governor's Island, for example, is mostly
Speaker 1: the excavation from the Lexington Avenue subway right but Rebecca,
Speaker 1: because that Triple land was was land filled between eighteen
Speaker 1: o three and eighteen no subway at that time. Most
Speaker 1: of it probably came from the leveling of hills in Manhattan,
Speaker 1: because Manhattan and I had a lot of hills in
Speaker 1: those days. And also oyster shells and garbage and broken
Speaker 1: ships undoubtedly, right, people who drowned and men control buildings
Speaker 1: exactly so so so he so the it comes and
Speaker 1: when it comes, and they they did have to leave.
Speaker 1: They did have to leave. And basically the city went
Speaker 1: through the neighborhood and declared their building, um condemned. They
Speaker 1: condemned that building, yes, and and then the tenants fight that.
Speaker 1: They did have to fight that, and there was a
Speaker 1: court case which was there was a little article in
Speaker 1: the New York Times about it. Um. You know, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of contention about you know, the state
Speaker 1: of the building before Sandy had not been great because
Speaker 1: it hadn't been maintained, and the landlord objected and all
Speaker 1: this stuff. I can't totally disclose all of the details
Speaker 1: because there was a settlement, um, but it resolved, and
Speaker 1: then they decided to leave Upstate, Yeah Valley. They to
Speaker 1: the Hudson Valley. So so did they try to make
Speaker 1: it work in New York before they went to the
Speaker 1: Hudson Valley. You know, my father is a and I'm
Speaker 1: sure he'll listen to this and chuckle, you know, actually
Speaker 1: doing my impresonation. Come on, spawn on, come on. I
Speaker 1: think you're a terrible But I just that's my memory
Speaker 1: with this tough looking early guy painter. I'm a paint
Speaker 1: to see. Come up and see my paintings. He was
Speaker 1: such a New Yorker team he was, he was. He's
Speaker 1: got a little more of the Bronx in there, I
Speaker 1: think than than that. But you know, the thing with
Speaker 1: him was that is that he he's um. He's someone
Speaker 1: who likes to stay. He's a very grounded person. So
Speaker 1: his initial um impulse was to move back to the Bronx.
Speaker 1: He needed a studio. Yeah, I mean, the fact of
Speaker 1: the matter is my father had a big studio in
Speaker 1: Lower Manhattan. And there is no way that you can
Speaker 1: replicate that and talk about what happened Tobacca Price Chebecca.
Speaker 1: But I forget Brooklyn, forget about it. Even I'm going
Speaker 1: to talk about that too, and so so we can't
Speaker 1: replicate it in the Bronx. The Bronx are gonna be
Speaker 1: torn down. Now to the Bronx. All my friends and
Speaker 1: are real estate executives. That's the that's the not even
Speaker 1: the next they're there now they're tearing everything down and
Speaker 1: they're talking about million and two million dollar condos overlooking
Speaker 1: Yankee steady him, that's good to your view. And then
Speaker 1: they're talking about two movie studios they're building up. Their
Speaker 1: Silver Cup went up there. Absolutely, they were all going
Speaker 1: to take their properties in Queens, tear that down, build housing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to name name some of them. Some
Speaker 1: of them can tear their spaces down. Some can's if
Speaker 1: there's a financial incent of you know, in New York
Speaker 1: there's the land is worth more money as residential housing
Speaker 1: for overlooking the river. You're right over there on the
Speaker 1: foot of the fifty Night Street Bridge in Long Island City.
Speaker 1: Some people who will remain nameless that I know, have
Speaker 1: told me they're going to go up to the Bronx
Speaker 1: and move their whole operation up to the Bronx. You
Speaker 1: know that that wasn't My father's first impulse was to
Speaker 1: move up there, and my brother from exactly. Yeah, my
Speaker 1: brother and I kind of invade upon him to to
Speaker 1: look to look a little further out, and so you know,
Speaker 1: he found a place that that where he was able
Speaker 1: to build a new studio. He built, Yeah, he built one.
Speaker 1: So he settlement and everything put him in a position
Speaker 1: he was comfortable. He's doing okay. So he built a
Speaker 1: new studio, which was the right thing for him to do.
Speaker 1: He got a place where he could live and work. Uh, comfortable.
Speaker 1: But he is he up there and a year goes by,
Speaker 1: and does he turn to your mother and go, man,
Speaker 1: we should have done this twenty years ago. You know,
Speaker 1: did he just really sit there and go, why did
Speaker 1: I break my ass to stay in Manhattan? Or did
Speaker 1: he miss New York? Every time I visit them, we
Speaker 1: have this conversation, what does he say? We go through
Speaker 1: it over and over again, and you know he does
Speaker 1: miss Tribeca and misses that neighborhood because there are a
Speaker 1: lot of things about it that that made it a
Speaker 1: wonderful place to be. Um and it's and it's it
Speaker 1: is sad to be gone from there, but the things
Speaker 1: he likes, their plus is about being up there. It's
Speaker 1: lovely being away from the city too. And I think
Speaker 1: that Um, when we think about what Rebecca has become,
Speaker 1: where their neighborhood became in the time even before standing
Speaker 1: building they're putting up in place of that building is
Speaker 1: like yeah, I mean, but it looks like something made
Speaker 1: of legos. Their community. The people who were there when
Speaker 1: they came, all of them are gone. They either have
Speaker 1: been bought out or or forced out or passed away.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's it's a generational turnover. It's funny
Speaker 1: how people don't realize. I mean in my lifetime, I
Speaker 1: mean I came here and that was the dawn of
Speaker 1: the build out of Soho, and then Rebecca beyond that,
Speaker 1: and then the battery part. Did you ever imagine that
Speaker 1: apartments would sell for thirty million dollars right around the
Speaker 1: corner for where you grew up? I mean it is.
Speaker 1: I mean I think it's unrealistic in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: But but at the same time, everybody wants to live there.
Speaker 1: That's reflective of the bigger trends in our economy and
Speaker 1: our politics and our work about right now, I mean
Speaker 1: talk about how it plays up in New York. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean New York is not divorced from the economy
Speaker 1: of of of the United States. It's it's part of it,
Speaker 1: and it always has been. Go. You go all the
Speaker 1: way back to um the very very beginning of that
Speaker 1: neighborhood of Tribeca in those days, to Alexander Hamilton's and
Speaker 1: and the things that they were dealing with after the
Speaker 1: revel luction. And if you look through my piece about
Speaker 1: the evolution of that particular neighborhood, it's always been connected
Speaker 1: to the economy of of America and right now is
Speaker 1: no different. And right now we're living in a in
Speaker 1: a plutocracy where you have you know, billionaires right and left,
Speaker 1: and they and and really they have unfettered power to
Speaker 1: buy and sell real estate, and that is very clearly
Speaker 1: distorting the marketplace in the broader economy. Matthew Landfield on
Speaker 1: Changes at thirty one De Sproses Street, and around the globe,
Speaker 1: the battle between preservation and development in New York can
Speaker 1: be brutal. Perhaps New York's most prominent preservationist is Andrew Berman.
Speaker 1: He's the one who led the charge to landmark the
Speaker 1: iconic streets of southern Greenwich Village. After fifty years of
Speaker 1: people trying to get that area landmarks, we were able
Speaker 1: to get it landmarked in two stage. We actually had
Speaker 1: an almost blackmail the city. They wanted to get an
Speaker 1: area adjacent to that reasoned as a stop to a
Speaker 1: developer Trinity real Estate in this case um and we
Speaker 1: pushed the city council to say, we won't approve the
Speaker 1: reasoning that you the city want, unless you move ahead
Speaker 1: with this landmarking that the community has been asking for
Speaker 1: for years. Here the rest of that interview at Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing dot org more with Matthew Landfield coming up.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: No political battle and recent memory has crystallized attitudes about
Speaker 1: gentrification more than Amazon's proposal to build its second headquarters
Speaker 1: in the Queen's neighborhood of Long Island City. Overnight, the
Speaker 1: real estate values in Long Island City were went through
Speaker 1: the roof. And you know, I think that that's just
Speaker 1: another indicator of aspects of economy that are just broken.
Speaker 1: I think that's true of the whole city in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways of Manhattan. You know, it's very uh
Speaker 1: manicured in a way, and it's I don't want to
Speaker 1: say it's never going to go back, because one thing
Speaker 1: that i UM found in doing the research into the
Speaker 1: history of of Um where I grew up, was that
Speaker 1: the city waxed and waned described a period where it
Speaker 1: waned well between eighteen seventy and nineteen forty. All of
Speaker 1: Lower Manhattan was this massive sport, just a gigantic shipping
Speaker 1: hub from from from the very tip of the battery
Speaker 1: all the way up goods and and all kinds of
Speaker 1: foods and services until after the Second World War, when
Speaker 1: shipping trans formed into container shipping. The technology of container
Speaker 1: ships was developed, these enormous tanker size ships that could
Speaker 1: ship more, that could ship faster, and it was just
Speaker 1: it was less expensive. So all of that moved to
Speaker 1: the Port of Elizabeth in New Jersey. That meant that
Speaker 1: the entire west side became a ghost town and you
Speaker 1: have this sort of vacuum of space, and and into
Speaker 1: that vacuum artists started exactly exactly. So that's that's one
Speaker 1: version of how the city, that part of the city
Speaker 1: has waxed and waned Um. But even before that, when Um,
Speaker 1: the neighborhood was first settled by really by Trinity Church,
Speaker 1: because Trinity Church owned a lot of the land down
Speaker 1: Um and still does own a lot of land, Trinity
Speaker 1: owns a lot of stuff. Trining owns this building. So
Speaker 1: after the Revolution, the church burned down, had burned down
Speaker 1: during the war, there was a terrible fire burned down.
Speaker 1: They had to rebuild the church, and the congregation grew,
Speaker 1: and UH, the city was starting to grow, and so
Speaker 1: they wanted to expand, and they wanted to build a
Speaker 1: new church UM a little further north, just just north
Speaker 1: of City Hall. And so they built a chapel called
Speaker 1: St John's Chapel, which was on Vestry and Verick. And
Speaker 1: in front of the church, they built a park called
Speaker 1: St John's Park or Hudson Square, and that that park
Speaker 1: um was a private park. There were houses that were
Speaker 1: that were the Grammercy Park in fact, was the model
Speaker 1: for Grammercy Park and Washington Square Park. They built houses
Speaker 1: around the park and they wanted um. They wanted basically
Speaker 1: wealthy people who were mostly living down on like Broadway
Speaker 1: and further further south, like closer to Wall Street, they
Speaker 1: wanted them to move in there. And so that neighborhood
Speaker 1: becomes a wealthy, kind of very genteel enclave around the
Speaker 1: park between eight and eighteen fifty. But then you have
Speaker 1: the railroad, Cornelius. Vanderbilt builds the Hudson River railroad line
Speaker 1: along Hudson Street and starts running trains up and down
Speaker 1: to ship things back and forth. And Uh, the residents
Speaker 1: of that neighborhood, I don't want to be close to
Speaker 1: the railroad, and so they start to leave. And so
Speaker 1: by eighteen sixty seven they were completely out of the area,
Speaker 1: and the park is sold and and and converted into
Speaker 1: a rail yard by by Vanderbilt. And so again you
Speaker 1: have you have this sort of waxing and waning of
Speaker 1: life in in a in a particular area, growth and
Speaker 1: death mostly do you know, partly due to technological change.
Speaker 1: I mean you have you have the coal powered steam engine,
Speaker 1: you have railroads, and with the Jeff Bezos area was
Speaker 1: like that exactly exactly. And so what I want you
Speaker 1: to get to is what was the genesis of this
Speaker 1: piece you wrote? So after Sandy my parents left, they
Speaker 1: moved up up to that valley and a lot of
Speaker 1: the buildings down there were empty, and um, obviously something
Speaker 1: was going to be done with them. Um, I didn't
Speaker 1: know what they knocked down the building that it was
Speaker 1: demolished in twenty end. And you know that was that
Speaker 1: was painful to to experience. It was very painful. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's very sad um and I had a lot of
Speaker 1: feelings about it. And at the time I had I
Speaker 1: actually been recently laid off from a demanding job and
Speaker 1: I was kind of burned out and I wanted to
Speaker 1: do something a little bit different. And I went down
Speaker 1: there one day and the building was completely gone, and
Speaker 1: I was looking down into the foundation and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, what's in there? Like I wondered. I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, were there you know American Indians who
Speaker 1: lived there? Was there? Is there like some archaeological history
Speaker 1: in there? I want to know what was under there
Speaker 1: because I never thought about the building and now being there.
Speaker 1: And then number two, like what it was on in
Speaker 1: the first place. That started me off in this sort
Speaker 1: of inquiry. And I didn't plan to write anything. I
Speaker 1: didn't plan to tell anybody. I just was gonna answer
Speaker 1: the question for myself. And so I started digging into it,
Speaker 1: and um, I found a lot of that in collecting
Speaker 1: the material and looking into it. The only way I
Speaker 1: could make sense of it was to write it all
Speaker 1: down and compile it into some form that could communicate
Speaker 1: both my feelings about the experience of having grown up
Speaker 1: in this place as well as what I was learning
Speaker 1: about the history of the place and perhaps what the
Speaker 1: future of the place might be. UM So that was
Speaker 1: really the genesis of writing that particularly. I want did
Speaker 1: it take you to write the piece? There's like copious
Speaker 1: research involved in this piece. I got a little carried away,
Speaker 1: you know, and answer these questions. It has a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff in it, and I did do a fair
Speaker 1: amount of reason church. I'd spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: in the library, which I have to say, if if
Speaker 1: anyone UH is interested in supporting an institution, the near
Speaker 1: public library is probably the best when I can think
Speaker 1: of right now. And I just kept finding things that
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, look at these photographs,
Speaker 1: look at this material of St. John's Park, or these
Speaker 1: images of the docks in Lower Manhattan in eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: nine or whatever like, and all of this has gone
Speaker 1: like these are phantoms that have been forgotten about but
Speaker 1: made the city what it is. They're the reason why
Speaker 1: I was there at all, and I wanted to capture that.
Speaker 1: And in nine they moved, Yeah, my mom dad moved
Speaker 1: there in sixty nine. And um. When they moved there,
Speaker 1: that building had been empty for probably at least five years,
Speaker 1: had been an industrial manufacturing building where they made protesting
Speaker 1: coughs syrope. There was no bathroom, there was no kitchen,
Speaker 1: there was there was nothing. When when artists moved into
Speaker 1: that neighborhood at that time, they were moving into largely
Speaker 1: commercial spaces, renting them on like ten year commercial leases
Speaker 1: and living there, which was technically illegal illegal. What do
Speaker 1: they do about the facilities that they didn't have? Where
Speaker 1: do they put them in? Put They put in um,
Speaker 1: you know, hartwood floors and the kitchens and bathrooms and stuff.
Speaker 1: And your dad did that and rent was so the
Speaker 1: owners who had run it as the industrial building, they
Speaker 1: were commercial landlords let them come in there. They just
Speaker 1: turned a blind eye. When I came to New York
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy nine, it was the beginning of the
Speaker 1: flip of SOHO and you'd read in the Village Voice.
Speaker 1: You'd read about, you know, the battle to save industrial
Speaker 1: space in New York, and everyone kept saying, well, maybe
Speaker 1: it'll come back and eventually get to the I don't
Speaker 1: know what year was, seventy seventy seventy nine, where it's
Speaker 1: which basically ruled they're not coming back, and they allow
Speaker 1: the residential build out of Soho. This place was a
Speaker 1: bolt factory. This place was a sewing machine factory on
Speaker 1: Green Street or Westboro. And they're all gone and you're
Speaker 1: in front of all these cast iron buildings they're about
Speaker 1: to flip. But T Rebecca was behind that, right exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean also under the Lenape, because the Lenape Indians
Speaker 1: were the original inhabitants of Manhattan. What I didn't really
Speaker 1: know was that there hadn't been people there before. It
Speaker 1: had been the river, that particular strip of lower Manhattan
Speaker 1: field was it was filled. It had originally like when
Speaker 1: European settlers got there in the very beginning, all of
Speaker 1: that was was the river, and and it was filled
Speaker 1: in over over the course of several years. And I
Speaker 1: found who who filled it in. I found out who
Speaker 1: filled it in. Well, what happens is between seventeen ninety
Speaker 1: and eighteen o three the city starts to sell the
Speaker 1: water rights to the coast of the of the island
Speaker 1: and say you we will sell the rights to the
Speaker 1: coast if you develop it. If you develop it, and
Speaker 1: so real estate speculators a guy named Hugh Gaine is
Speaker 1: one of them. Uh. He was a printer, he was
Speaker 1: a publisher, he was a real estate speculator. Um kind
Speaker 1: of was a little bit on both sides of the
Speaker 1: war in the revolution. Uh right. Um, he buys the
Speaker 1: particular lots there and starts to development and been to lots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they divided up into lots. Um. And so what he
Speaker 1: does is or what they do is is they they
Speaker 1: first they build these wharves, I guess, the little wars.
Speaker 1: They are called Cobb wharves. And then they start to
Speaker 1: kind of like fill in the space in between them
Speaker 1: with with junk, with with oyster shells, with detritus from
Speaker 1: the city from you know, uh, earth from from hills
Speaker 1: that have been leveled further inland on the island. And
Speaker 1: over the course of about twenty five years, the um
Speaker 1: the West Street areas developed. So like you know, Washington
Speaker 1: Street is filled in, then the block west of Washington
Speaker 1: is filled in, and then there's there's West Street. Now,
Speaker 1: that edge of the island was still pretty rough even
Speaker 1: all the way up until about eighteen seventy when the
Speaker 1: city goes in and really standardizes. The must be a
Speaker 1: massive engineering and it took It took a long time,
Speaker 1: but yeah, so so I found that and what that
Speaker 1: told me was that when Sandy flooded Lower Manhattan, the
Speaker 1: high water mark lines up with the contours of the
Speaker 1: island before it was settled. You can overlay the I
Speaker 1: found this amazing. It is it is like that you
Speaker 1: can overlay the sixteen o nine version of Manhattan to
Speaker 1: Sandy the inundation zone, and it lines up right in
Speaker 1: there and doesn't like Rebecca, you know, maybe it doesn't
Speaker 1: like the settlement so much. I don't know, because before
Speaker 1: Hugh gained, before settlement, before they developed it, it it was
Speaker 1: it was swamp. I suppose the word is takeaway or
Speaker 1: what have you. But when when you look back on
Speaker 1: you spent a lot of time writing this, You spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time researching. There's a lot of research
Speaker 1: that win this. And when you're done, how do you
Speaker 1: feel about what's happened to the property, your home? Have
Speaker 1: you made peace with that or are you still Yeah?
Speaker 1: So it's a place that I love. It's my home.
Speaker 1: It's the village in which I was raised, regardless of
Speaker 1: of the the the economics, regardless of who's who's living there,
Speaker 1: regardless of the historic preservation or the real estate or whatever.
Speaker 1: My takeaway is that my home is in jeopardy from
Speaker 1: climate change. I think that that particular place is is
Speaker 1: at risk of being an uninhabitable place in in a
Speaker 1: generation or two. And it doesn't matter if you make
Speaker 1: a lot of money or if you are just a
Speaker 1: normal person working to to make a living. We're facing
Speaker 1: a threat that requires us to confront together or else
Speaker 1: we will have to retreat to other boundaries. Maybe yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, well, with with my family, we had to go.
Speaker 1: We said to my father, you can't stay there because
Speaker 1: if there's another sandy, you won't make it through. So
Speaker 1: we chose to to move to higher ground. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: there will be people who will listen to this and
Speaker 1: think that I'm crazy. Look at the property values and
Speaker 1: you can still make so much money, and apartments down
Speaker 1: there and they're selling for millions and millions, and the
Speaker 1: true threat from climate change may be far off. But
Speaker 1: for us, it's in the rear view mirror. Right. New
Speaker 1: York is an island on an estuary. It's it's a
Speaker 1: it's it's surrounded by water. We are not immune and
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people with a lot of
Speaker 1: precious things here that are at risk, and we have
Speaker 1: to either solve our political problems and start dealing with it,
Speaker 1: or we have to make a plan. And I have
Speaker 1: not heard any politician or leader adequately address the scale
Speaker 1: of what are truly dealing with and not in this country.
Speaker 1: You know, I think I will say, like God bless her,
Speaker 1: Alexandra Kazi Cortez is one of the few who's actually
Speaker 1: saying it. And here's the other thing about it. We're
Speaker 1: not good at dealing with problems that are beyond our imagining.
Speaker 1: If I told you on September ten, two thousan't one
Speaker 1: that by noon the next day the two towers would
Speaker 1: be completely and thousands of people would be dead, and
Speaker 1: most people would have thought you were crazy if you
Speaker 1: had said that. But the next day what happened. And
Speaker 1: and I remember seeing those buildings and and and and
Speaker 1: the whole in the from the plane and thinking, how
Speaker 1: are they going to fix that? How how are they
Speaker 1: going to repair that? And it didn't occur to me
Speaker 1: that they weren't going to be able to fix it,
Speaker 1: that that there are some things, there are some problems
Speaker 1: that you just cannot that you can't that can't solve.
Speaker 1: And I think that with with the situation like we're
Speaker 1: facing with what is with climate change? Um, it is
Speaker 1: one of those problems. And so either we address the
Speaker 1: problem and do what we have to do to cut
Speaker 1: emissions or whatever it is, what are those policies to try.
Speaker 1: We're not even trying. Our politics are so broken we
Speaker 1: can try. If that is the case, then we have
Speaker 1: to say, Okay, what does that mean. If it means
Speaker 1: that the whole neighborhoods are going to flood, we have
Speaker 1: to be prepared for how do we get people out
Speaker 1: of that? At high tide the Lenapic, they could canoe
Speaker 1: from the East River up a creek into the Collect Pond,
Speaker 1: which is now where the Center Street Courthouse is, across
Speaker 1: another creek to the Hudson without getting out of the bowl.
Speaker 1: And if you look at projections of what climate change
Speaker 1: will do in Lower Manhattan, it may be possible again.
Speaker 1: Author and filmmaker Matthew Landfield on the past, present and
Speaker 1: future of his native soil. His article is called Requiem
Speaker 1: for a Living City, Notes on a Home in Rebecca,
Speaker 1: and it's available on his website Matt Landfield dot com.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing
Speaker 1: m