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    Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New York
    Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New York
    Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New York
    Ebook671 pages7 hours

    Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New York

    By Bathroom Readers' Institute

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    About this ebook

    Uncle John loves New York, so he's taking the plunge…into the land of bagels, bluebirds, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

    Start spreading the news. You’re reading today. You’re going to be a part of it--New York, New Yooooork! In this ode to the greatest place on Earth, Uncle John takes you through Ellis Island and down the Hudson to bring you the tome about New York that could only come from the Bathroom Readers’ Institute. Find out why the Empire State is the Big Apple of the world’s eye as you read about…

     

    * Manhattanhenge
    * The Big Apple on $0 a day
    * Heroes and horses of the NYPD
    * Fran Lee: the Pooper Scooper Lady
    * The extraordinary evolution of the Bronx River
    * Incredible finds…in the city’s sewers
    * How New Jersey lost Staten Island
    * Charlie Dickens disses New York
    * The alien hunters of Pine Bush
    * Big Apple bird watching
    * Upstate utopias
    And much, much more!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPortable Press
    Release dateJun 1, 2012
    ISBN9781607106517
    Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New York
    Author

    Bathroom Readers' Institute

    The Bathroom Readers' Institute is a tight-knit group of loyal and skilled writers, researchers, and editors who have been working as a team for years. The BRI understands the habits of a very special market—Throne Sitters—and devotes itself to providing amazing facts and conversation pieces.

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      A fine work of New York- related trivia. Extremely interesting!

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    Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New York - Bathroom Readers' Institute

    TALKING ABOUT NYC

    How would you describe New York City?

    New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

    —Alistair Cooke

    I moved to New York City for my health. I’m paranoid, and it was the only place where my fears were justified.

    —Anita Weiss

    Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary, but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real and I myself am not a dream.

    —Helen Keller

    New York attracts the most people in the world in the arts and professions. It also attracts them in other fields. Even the bums are talented.

    —Edmund Love

    In New York it’s not whether you win or lose—it’s how you lay the blame.

    —Fran Lebowitz

    When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London.

    —Bette Midler

    The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

    —Desmond Morris

    One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

    —Thomas Wolfe

    One day, there were four innocent people shot. That’s the best shooting done in this town. Hard to find four innocent people in New York.

    —Will Rogers

    This is New York, and there’s no law against being annoying.

    —William Kuntsler

    I miss New York. I still love how people talk to you on the street—just assault you and tell you what they think of your jacket.

    —Madonna

    Each year, maintenance crews at the Statue of Liberty scrape up 39 gallons of chewing gum.

    YOU KNOW YOU’RE A

    NEW YORKER WHEN…

    • You’re living in a 350-square-foot studio apartment that costs $2,000 a month, and you think it’s a fantastic deal.

    • Your navigational directions are east, west, uptown, and downtown.

    • You’ve never been to the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, or Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but you have seen Ground Zero at midnight, and you’ve walked the Highline.

    • You say the city but mean Manhattan.

    • You sprint to catch the subway even when you’re not in a hurry.

    • You consider yourself multilingual if you can curse in more than one language.

    • All the clothes in your closet are black.

    • Your front door has at least three locks (and possibly a snow shovel propped under the knob for extra protection).

    • You’d climb three flights of subway stairs with crutches to avoid the subway elevator.

    • You think of Central Park as nature and the Staten Island Ferry as a romantic boat ride.

    • Westchester is considered upstate.

    • You’re able to concentrate on your morning paper while standing in a crowded subway with a mariachi band playing in the middle of the car.

    • You live in a building with 100 apartments, but know only three of your neighbors.

    • You know someone who knows someone who knows the mayor.

    Shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbuilt’s first business venture was a Staten Island–Manhattan ferry, purchased with money borrowed from his mom.

    ALMOST FAMOUS

    New York has so many world-famous attractions that many

    lesser-known ones get overshadowed…like these.

    NEW YORK HALL OF SCIENCE

    Location: Queens

    Located in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the Hall of Science opened in 1964 for the World’s Fair. (More about that on page 277.) When the fair ended and the other exhibits closed, the Hall of Science stayed open. Today, it’s the only hands-on science center in New York City and has more than 450 exhibits—you can peer into powerful microscopes and watch microbes move, figure out how much of your body weight is actually water, and play minigolf to learn that spaceships and golf balls are powered by the same forces.

    PELHAM BAY PARK

    Location: The Bronx

    At more than 2,700 acres, Pelham Bay Park is three times larger than Central Park and offers a much wilder experience. There’s a wildlife sanctuary full of egrets, racoons, blackbirds, and a salt marsh; Orchard Beach, the only public beach in the Bronx; and Split Rock, where 17th-century activist and reformer Anne Hutchinson supposedly hid before she was killed by a group of Native Americans fighting a war with the Dutch settlers.

    ROOSEVELT ISLAND SKYTRAM

    Location: Manhattan

    Instead of driving or taking a bus or the F train to visit Roosevelt Island, you can fly…sort of. The skytram takes about three minutes (and $2.25) to cross the East River from 59th Street/Second Avenue to Roosevelt Island, and from 250 feet above ground, the views are spectacular. The tram made an appearance in the 2002 movie Spider-Man: The Green Goblin throws Mary Jane over the Queensboro bridge at the same time that he drops a tram full of children, trying to force Spider-Man to choose between the woman he loves and the kids. (Spidey, of course, saves them all.)

    HOLE IN ONE

    In more than 100 years of bagel making, New Yorkers have acquired such a passion for the doughy bread that it has become an internationally known icon of the city. But the bagel isn’t a native New Yorker.

    BAGEL TALES

    There’s a lot of debate over how bagels came to be. One story says a 17th-century Austrian baker wanted to make a gift for King John III Sobieski of Poland, who saved Austria from a Turkish invasion. The king was a famous horseman, so the baker shaped the dough like a stirrup. (The Austrian word for stirrup is bügel.)

    Another story goes like this: Around 1610, the first bagel, called a beygl in Yiddish, came out of a Jewish oven in Krakow, Poland. Historians say the doughnut-shaped rolls were designed to be gifts for Jewish women with infants—the hole in the bread represented the gift of life and the crusty roll was a useful teething ring. Also, unlike other breads, bagels could be boiled before the Jewish Sabbath, left until after the religious observance 24 hours later (Jewish law forbade cooking on the Sabbath), and then quickly baked to perfection. People loved them.

    In the late 19th century, bagels invaded the U.S. by way of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Vendors typically sold them as street food, but by 1907, one group of prominent New York bagel makers had founded the International Bagel Bakers Union to protect their recipes. Not just anyone could join; only the sons of former members were eligible. The union’s leader, Moishe Soprano, was tough and no-nonsense—he secured contracts with nearly all the bakeries in the New York City area, ensuring bagel-making consistency for decades. A union contract also gave the consumers piece of mind—Soprano and his bakers kneaded their dough by hand, unlike lower-end bagel makers outside the union who, rumor had it, often kneaded the dough with their feet.

    BAGELS FOR ALL

    After World War I, Canadian bagel-maker Meyer Mickey Thompson tried to create an automated bagel maker. He failed because his invention was too expensive, but his son Daniel succeeded, creating the Thompson Bagel Machine, and started churning them out in the 1960s in a six-car garage in New Haven, Connecticut. Thompson Bagel Machines could produce about 400 bagels an hour at minimal cost. Bagel bakers Harry Lender and Florence Sender took it from there, using the machines to mass-produce frozen bagels and selling them to supermarkets everywhere.

    About 1 in every 36 people living in the U.S. resides in NYC.

    In 1988, Americans ate an average of one bagel a month. But an upsurge in bagel sales soon chewed up the competition: Five years later, it was a bagel every two weeks and growing.

    BAGEL BITS

    • In North America, there are two types of bagel: The New York version and the Montreal. The New York contains salt and malt, and is boiled in water and then baked so that it’s puffy with a moist crust. The Montreal is smaller, due to a larger hole, and has no salt; it’s boiled in honey-sweetened water and then baked in a wood-fired oven, making it crunchy and sweet. To New York’s chagrin, the first bagel in space was the Montreal version. Canadian-born astronaut Gregory Chamitoff lifted off in the 2008 Space Shuttle Discovery with a shipment of 18 sesame-seeded bagels from his cousin’s bakery in Montreal…and delivered them to the International Space Station.

    • In the spring of 2009, New York State tax collectors shut down the H&H bagel factory in Manhattan (popularized on the TV show Seinfeld) for failing to pay $100,000 in back taxes. For three hours, customers stood forlorn outside the closed bagel emporium until owner Helmer Toro came up with a $25,000 tax bill installment that allowed H&H to reopen.

    BITE ME

    In 1996…

    • 9,655 New Yorkers were bitten by dogs.

    • 184 were bitten by rats.

    • 1,102 were bitten by people.

    The name Schenectady is from a Mohawk word meaning the other side of the pine lands.

    SO YOU THINK YOU

    KNOW NEW YORK CITY

    A few strange facts and stories that even a seasoned New Yorker might not know.

    • There are more than 2,000 bridges in New York City. Two of them are retractile, meaning they can slide open or even be pulled ashore to let ships through.

    • The life-size bronze elephant that stands in the United Nations Sculpture Garden on 46th Street was given to the U.N. in 1998 by the governments of Kenya, Namibia, and Nepal. But the anatomically correct animal sports a two-foot long…um…appendage. Today, plants strategically hide the controversial body part, but sadly, the garden is closed. You can still glimpse his front quarters from the street, though.

    • Why are water towers and tanks so common on the rooftops of New York buildings? Because a water code from the 19th century specifies that all New York City buildings over six stories must have individual water storage enough to douse a fire above the sixth floor. Aqueducts and water pressure can take care of the first six floors; the amount of extra water and the size of the tank are commensurate with the number of extra floors.

    • You can’t fly directly to California from LaGuardia Airport. A Perimeter Rule set by the Port Authority limits the number of miles an airplane can fly nonstop out of LaGuardia. Maximum: 1,500. After Flushing airport closed in 1984, most of its traffic was diverted to LaGuardia, so the Port Authority instituted the Perimeter Rule to avoid overcrowding. Two exceptions: 1) There is no cap on Saturday, and 2) the rule doesn’t apply to flights to Denver (just over 1,700 miles) and some parts of the Caribbean—because nonstops from LaGuardia to those places were allowed before the rule was made.

    • The next total solar eclipse visible from New York will happen on May 1, 2079.

    In 1918 cartoonist Robert Ripley introduced his Believe It or Not feature in the New York Globe.

    THE SWINGINGEST

    BOROUGH

    New Orleans is often cited as the birthplace of jazz, and Chicago, Harlem, and Kansas City are recognized as critical launching pads for the music. But the borough of Queens is where the coolest cats chose to crash when they were beat, ya dig?

    WHAT A WONDERFUL NEIGHBORHOOD

    In 1943, after more than two decades of traveling and performing, jazz great Louis Satchmo Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, settled down for the first time and bought a house at 34-56 107th Street in Corona, Queens. It remained his home until his death in 1971, and after Lucille passed away in 1983, the two-story house became the Louis Armstrong House Museum. To this day, the interiors are preserved as the Armstrongs left them, and the den features an extensive archive of Satchmo’s personal reel-to-reel recordings. And although Armstrong mostly maintained a level of modesty appropriate for a man who grew up in the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs, he did allow himself certain household indulgences, including a kitchen with all its appliances built-in (including the blender) and gold faucets in the bathroom.

    Why did Satchmo settle in Queens? The cultural diversity and domestic possibilities that Queens offered are best summed up by Armstrong himself: I am here with the black people, with the Puerto Rican people, the Italian people, the Hebrew cats, and there’s food in the Frigidaire. What else could I want? And he wasn’t the only jazz great to call Queens home.

    THE SAINTS OF ST. ALBANS

    Many notable musicians made their homes in the Queens neighborhood of St. Albans, particularly in the enclave of Addisleigh Park. A list of the notable residents reads like a poster for a jazz festival:

    • Fats Waller (173-19 Sayres Avenue): This master tickler (jazz slang for piano player) and writer of such classics as Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Honeysuckle Rose came to the neighborhood in 1938. Many jazz historians name him as the first African American to call Addisleigh Park home. His house boasted a Steinway grand piano and a built-in Hammond organ.

    Most recent nation admitted to the U.N.: Montenegro (2006).

    • Count Basie (174-27 Adelaide Road): A native of Red Bank, New Jersey, Basie and his wife, Catherine, lived in Addisleigh Park from 1946 to 1971. The couple was popular among neighborhood youths for generously granting access to their backyard pool.

    • Ella Fitzgerald (179-07 Murdock Avenue): The First Lady of Song never had a stable home as a child. Her parents separated when she was young, her mother died when she was a teenager, her stepfather abused her—and there were stopovers at reform school, a period of homelessness, and a short stint working lookout at a New York bordello. But as a teenager, she won an amateur talent show at Harlem’s storied Apollo Theater, and a star was born. She moved into the house in Queens with her husband, bassist Ray Brown, in 1949. The couple divorced in 1953, but Fitzgerald stayed put until 1956.

    • Milt Hinton (173-05 113th Avenue): A resident of Queens for 50 years until his death in 2000, Hinton was a bassist and sideman for a staggering number of artists (as a studio musician, he appeared on 1,174 recordings), including Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Ben Webster, and neighbors Louis Armstrong and Count Basie.

    • Cootie Williams (175-19 Linden Boulevard): From 1947 to 1953, this star trumpet player of the Duke Ellington Band lived in a three-story Tudor-style house that featured a prominent fairy-tale-style turret. Another notable musician lived there in the 1960s: Godfather of Soul James Brown.

    ROYAL FLUSHING

    The Flushing Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, is the final resting place for two prominent jazz trumpeters: King of Jazz Louis Armstrong (1901–71) and Crown Prince of Bop Dizzy Gillespie (1917–93).

    There’s two kinds of music: good and bad. I play the good kind.

    —Louis Armstrong

    New Yorker Rangers record for the most goals scored in a single NHL season: 54 (Jaromir Jagr, 2006).

    MANHATTANHENGE

    Want to see a perfect sunset? Twice a year, you can get your wish right in Manhattan.

    LET THE SUN SHINE

    Most of the time, the tall buildings in Manhattan block the sunset. But twice a year, above 14th Street, the sun aligns with the streets’ east–west grid pattern and sets perfectly between the buildings. It lasts only about 15 minutes, but it’s so striking that people stop on the streets to watch. As solar rays light up the towering buildings, a glowing orange light filters along the streets.

    The reflection off the buildings also scatters the sunshine, sending bright light along the north–south avenues as well. Because the phenomenon resembles sunsets seen at Great Britain’s mysterious Stonehenge ruins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, calls it Manhattanhenge.

    PERFECTION…ALMOST

    Stonehenge was built by the ancient Celtic Druids to mark the exact moment of the spring and fall equinoxes, when the sun rises and sets due east and due west of true north. But Manhattan’s street grid was established in 1811 for efficiency, not science, so it’s slightly off center—it’s turned 28.9 degrees from true east and west to be exact. As a result, the city’s equinoxes occur on different days each year

    Usually the dates are in late May and mid-July. But if you miss the exact dates, not to worry. The day before or after Manhattanhenge also creates a celestial glow—it’s not quite as magnificent, but still pretty good.

    According to deGrasse Tyson, who calculates the dates each year for the museum’s planetarium, the best way to see Manhattanhenge is this: Position yourself as far east in Manhattan as possible. But ensure that when you look west across the avenues you can still see New Jersey. Clear cross streets include 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, and several streets adjacent to them. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building render 34th Street and 42nd Streets especially striking vistas.

    PUNKED

    Even gritty New Yorkers are gullible. Take a trip through some of the silliest hoaxes ever perpetrated on a city (supposedly) full of skeptics.

    THE GREAT MOON HOAX

    Perpetrator: The New York Sun newspaper

    Story: The paper printed its first issue in 1833, and by 1835, it was looking for a circulation boost. So to drum up interest, editors announced the upcoming publication of six articles covering renowned British astronomer Sir John Herschel’s fantastic new discoveries of life on the moon: forests and seas, cranes and pelicans, herds of bison and goats, flocks of blue unicorns, sapphire temples with 70-foot pillars—even a race of bat-like humanoid creatures. According to the Sun, the articles would be reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

    The day the first article appeared, Sun sales were 15,000; by the sixth day, they were over 19,000, the highest of any New York paper of the time. Other newspapers, racing to catch up, claimed to have acquired the original Edinburgh Journal articles, but they actually just reprinted the Sun’s stories.

    Exposed! There were no original Edinburgh Journal articles…it was a hoax. In fact, that paper had gone out of business several years earlier. And Herschel, perhaps the most eminent astronomer of his time, was totally ignorant of the hoax (and amused by it until he got sick of answering questions about moon men). The articles were reportedly written by Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke. The Sun never formally admitted the deception, but it did publish a column speculating that a hoax was possible. Regardless, the paper got what it wanted: Circulation remained high.

    THE 140-YEAR-OLD HOT DOG HOAX

    Perpetrator: The Coney Island History Project

    Story: In 2009 and 2010, the Astroland amusement park at Coney Island was being demolished to make room for new games and rides. On Wednesday, February 24, 2010, the old kitchen building of the block-long Feltman’s restaurant on Surf Avenue was scheduled to go. (Charles Feltman is credited with the 1874 invention of the hot dog, and also with hiring the young Nathan Handwerker, who eventually struck out on his own and opened the legendary Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand.)

    On May 30, 1883, a rumor that the Brooklyn Bridge was collapsing spread through the crowds on it, causing a stampede that killed 12 people.

    According to CNN (which got the story from a local TV station), in the middle of the demolition, an amateur archaeologist unearthed an ice-encrusted object that he claimed was an original Feltman’s hot dog…140 years old. Officials of the Coney Island History Project swore that the dog, the bun, and an original receipt from Feltman’s had been preserved by the ice, and they immediately put the thawing relic on display. CNN, Grub Street (a New York food blog), and thousands of Tweeters bought it.

    Exposed! On February 26, a spokeswoman for the History Project admitted that it was all a publicity stunt in the grand tradition of Coney Island ballyhoo. The point? To get people out to Coney Island to see the Project’s exhibit about Feltman’s. It was a success—hundreds of people hurried out to Coney Island to see the show.

    THE CENTRAL PARK INTERNATIONAL

    AIRPORT HOAX

    Perpetrator: The Manhattan Airport Foundation (MAF)

    Story: On July 21, 2009, a group calling itself the Manhattan Airport Foundation (MAF) ran an Internet posting with an unusual idea: to bulldoze Central Park and turn it into an airport. The MAF called for the immediate development of a viable and centrally located international air transportation hub in New York City. Where? Central Park. Strawberry Fields would be replanted inside the new terminal, Tavern on the Green restaurant could move to the Food Court, and the Central Park Zoo would be relocated. The Huffington Post ran the story on its front page.

    Exposed! Who is the Manhattan Airport Foundation? No one knows. The group has a Web site and claimed to have offices on the 58th floor of the Woolworth Building (which has only 57 floors). According to MAF’s Web site, a petition to destroy the park in favor of the airport got 19,000 signatures.

    For more hoaxes, turn to page 134.

    THERE GOES THE

    NEIGHBORHOOD:

    THE BRONX

    The Bronx is the only borough of New York City that isn’t an island. It’s also the only place where you’ll find these neighborhoods.

    • The Bronx was named for the nearby Bronx River, which, in turn, was named for Jonas Bronck, an immigrant from Sweden who settled in the area in the 17th century.

    • The town of Spuyten Duyvil, a wooded neighborhood near the Hudson and Harlem rivers, also gets its name from a body of water: the Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Depending on how you pronounce them, the words mean devil’s whirlpool or spite the devil in Dutch. (It’s unclear why the Dutch had such a low opinion of the creek.)

    • New Yorkers can thank Jordan L. Mott, who opened an ironworks in the Bronx in the mid-1800s, for the neighborhood of Mott Haven. When the previous owner of the land—Gouverneur Morris II, who’d called the area Morristown—was asked if he minded Mott changing the neighborhood’s name, he quipped, I don’t care…while he is about it, he might as well change the Harlem River to the Jordan.

    • Tremont got its name from a 19th-century mailman who combined three (tre) neighborhoods in the West-Central Bronx: Fairmount, Mount Hope, and Mount Eden.

    • Between 1968 and 1970, the City of New York built a housing project of 15,372 units on 300 acres of filled marshland in the northeastern Bronx. It was one of the largest housing projects in the country and had room for about 60,000 people. Today, it’s called Co-op City, and if it weren’t part of the Bronx, it would be the tenth-largest city in the state of New York.

    The first retail Christmas tree lot in the U.S. opened in 1851 in NYC.

    THE MATH MAN

    Do you suffer from arithmophobia…the fear of math? (Yeah, we do, too.) Mathematician Glen Whitney has a remedy for that: a hands-on math museum, where he plans to make numbers fun for everyone.

    EVERYDAY MATH

    Glen Whitney of Long Island loves math, and he wants everyone else to love it too…or at least understand it. In his view, schools typically get math wrong by promoting that there’s only one right answer, when the true essence—and the fun part—of math is actually exploration and discovery. According to Whitney, many people don’t know that "Mathematics Underlies Simply Everything in the arts, sciences, and life in general. So on his Web site, he encourages people to let mathematics be your MUSE!"

    Whitney was fascinated when he took his two kids on a trip to a small museum of mathematics, the Goudreau Museum, in Herricks. But he was dismayed to hear in 2006 that the museum was closing, so Whitney quit his job at a hedge fund in 2008 and began a crusade to open his own math museum. He is now the president of Math Factory, a group he created to spark interest in math, and executive director of the Museum of Mathematics, which exhibits around New York and is looking for a permanent home.

    Contrary to popular belief, Whitney says, math isn’t just about numbers and calculations. It also has fun and practical uses. A card player can learn how to shuffle a deck to increase the probability of winning the next hand, and a musician can benefit from knowing how drums of different sizes and shapes will produce different pitches. Artists may experiment with a harmonograph, a pendulum with a pen attached, which makes spiral patterns that change depending on how it’s swung.

    MATH TOURS

    To get his message out to the public, Whitney leads free, appointment-only math tours of Manhattan. Groups meet at Lincoln Center outside the Alice Tully Hall theater and first learn how straight lines fit together to create the curved surface of the theater’s grandstand. From there, Whitney follows the most efficient route (jaywalking) across 66th Street to Lincoln Center Plaza. Stopping by a clock near Columbus Avenue, he explains that all clocks work by math, using ellipses and theories by the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras. Stopping at a fire hydrant, Whitney demonstrates how pentagonal lug nuts make it impossible for random mischief-makers to break open a hydrant with a simple wrench (city workers use special tools).

    There was enough steel inside the Twin Towers to have made three Brooklyn Bridges.

    The tour then moves on to Times Square, where, under the debt clock, Whitney discusses each household’s share of the U.S. national debt. Then he dashes gamblers’ dreams by exposing the unlikelihood of winning the lottery—it is, says Whitney, a tax on the mathematically illiterate. The tour typically ends an hour or so later with information useful to any New Yorker: Whitney calculates that, when possible, walking across blocks diagonally along the hypotenuse of a triangle (instead of traveling straight up and over), saves two blocks for every nine traveled.

    MATH MIDWAY

    The tours are just one way that Whitney gets the word out about math; another way is the traveling Math Midway, a carnival of sorts where every game has a mathematical punchline. It’s the first of several exhibits Whitney has planned for his museum. Some favorites:

    • Guests can ride a square-wheeled tricycle. How? By wheeling it over a wavy surface. The edges of the square wheels fit perfectly into the trough of each wave to smooth out what would otherwise be a bumpy ride.

    • As an introduction to graph theory, visitors navigate a giant maze without making any left turns.

    • Putting calculus into action, the Roller Graphicoaster has a wire track that people curve into shapes and then race a metal ball down to see which configuration allows it to travel fastest.

    • A funhouse mirror adjusts from concave to convex with the pull of a rope, so visitors can see how their reflections look different as the mirror changes.

    Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home no place else is good enough. —John Steinbeck

    MATH MUSEUM

    Eventually, Whitney plans to open his nonprofit math museum in a 15,000–20,000-square-foot space. It will be the first museum of its kind in the country. He explains, You won’t need to be a math whiz or a math lover to enjoy our museum. We’ll highlight the connections between math and a huge range of topics: art, biology, music, finance, sports, games, physics, juggling, photography, design, and so on.

    When he talks about math, Glen Whitney’s enthusiasm for a subject that usually gets a bad rap seems to rub off on those around him. With some hands-on problem-solving and exploration, even the greatest cases of arithmophobia can be eased. Go figure.

    NEW YORK’S STATE SYMBOLS

    • Fruit: apple

    • Animal: beaver

    • Insect: ladybug

    • Shell: bay scallop

    • Reptile: snapping turtle

    • Saltwater fish: striped bass

    • Fossil: Eurypterus remipes (a distant relative of the horseshoe crab)

    • Freshwater fish: brook trout

    • Bird: bluebird

    • Tree: sugar maple

    • Bush: lilac

    • Gem: garnet

    • Beverage: milk

    NY’S FINEST (PARKS)

    A quick tour through some of New York State’s crown jewels.

    LETCHWORTH STATE PARK. Located 60 miles southeast of Buffalo in Livingston County, this 14,350-acre park is home to The Grand Canyon of the East, Letchworth Gorge. It’s a 22-mile section of the Genesee River that contains three deep, stunning gorges, the middle of which, the Great Bend Gorge, plunges to 550 feet. The river forms three sizeable waterfalls within the park, and dozens more flow into it from the cliffs above—several of which are more than 500 feet tall themselves. The park was named after William Pryor Letchworth, a Buffalo businessman and philanthropist who donated the land to the state as a public park in 1906.

    RIVERBANK STATE PARK. The amazing thing about this park is its location: on top of a building in Manhattan. And not just any building; it’s on the roof of a working wastewater treatment plant, covered with tons of trucked-in soil. Situated along the Hudson River, the 28-acre park features a grassy area for picnics, several trees, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a skating rink (roller skating in the summer and ice-skating in the winter), an 800-seat theater, tennis and basketball courts, a restaurant, and a pedestrian esplanade that allows walkers views of Manhattan and the New Jersey Palisades across the river.

    GOOSEPOND MOUNTAIN STATE PARK. Near the village of Chester in New York State’s Lower Hudson Valley is this park for people who like a rustic experience: It’s almost completely undeveloped. There are no toilets, no running water—it’s even hard to find a parking space. Most of the park is pure woods and wetlands, and there are many miles of trails, which include wooden walkways over the wetlands, offering especially good viewing of a wide variety of waterfowl. Goosepond also has some interesting history: A rocky outcrop in the park hides a small rock shelter that, according to legend, was used as a hideout by the notorious Claudius Smith, leader of a group of Loyalist guerrillas known as the Cowboys, who terrorized the region during the Revolutionary War.

    Technically, NYC is an archipelago.

    JONES BEACH STATE PARK. This park takes up almost all of Jones Beach Island, one of the long, narrow barrier islands off Long Island. Its most popular feature: more than six miles of sandy beach along the Atlantic Ocean. Jones Beach is the most-visited beach on the East Coast—with some 6 million people passing through every year—so don’t go there for a quiet getaway. The park also has two huge old bathhouses, built in 1920s art deco style, a 231-foot water tower, and a two-mile-long stretch of boardwalk. All of the buildings were designed by the park’s chief founder, Robert Moses.

    ADIRONDACK PARK. The largest state-protected park in the contiguous United States, Adirondack Park covers an astounding 9,375 square miles—an area roughly the size of Vermont. It’s home to the Adirondack Mountains, more than 3,000 lakes (including Lake Placid, the site of two Winter Olympics), more than 2,000 miles of hiking trails, thousands of miles of rivers and streams, and a huge variety of mammals, including black bears, moose, coyotes, lynx, otters, beavers, and porcupines.

    • Adirondack Park is larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks…combined.

    • It’s considered a unique example of publicly and privately owned parkland. About 46 percent of the park—2.7 million acres—is a state-owned forest preserve. That land is protected by the New York State constitution as forever wild. The rest of the park is privately owned, although most of it is forest and sparsely developed farmland.

    • There are 103 towns and villages within the park’s boundaries, and about 137,000 people live there year-round.

    • The Adirondack Mountains have 46 peaks more than 4,000 feet high, including Mt. Marcy, the state’s highest, at 5,344 feet.

    • There are no official entrances to Adirondack Park, and there is no entrance fee. Just drive, bike, walk—or canoe—right in.

    Manhattan is the birthplace of Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint.

    THIS GUY’S

    IN–SAAAA–NE!

    Electronics is a dirty business…just ask ex-con Crazy Eddie Antar, who went from high to low in a New York minute.

    EDDIE TAKES OVER

    In the 1970s and ’80s, just about everybody in New York knew Crazy Eddie—or at least knew his TV commercials. His electronics stores were expanding throughout New York and into the surrounding states. And the commercials for those stores were legendary: They proclaimed that the prices at Crazy Eddie’s stores were Insaaaane! and spoofed everything from Superman to football. Crazy Eddie made millions after taking his family company public. Wall Street brokers and investors praised him as a retailing revolutionary and a business genius. But by the 1990s, all the Crazy Eddie stores were shut down, and Eddie was in prison. What happened?

    ALL IN THE FAMILY

    The Crazy Eddie saga began in 1969, when Eddie Antar, his cousin Ronnie, and his father Sam, founded a company called ERS Electronics (for Eddie, Ronnie, and Sam) and opened an electronics store called Sights and Sounds on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. The Antars were a close-knit family, and Sam Antar hoped that the store would expand to employ and support members of the extended family.

    But it didn’t. The new store struggled. Most people bought their electronics at department stores, so Sights and Sounds just wasn’t attracting enough shoppers. By 1971, it was in debt and close to bankruptcy, but Eddie was certain he could turn the business around. So Sam bought out Cousin Ronnie, gave his son Eddie two-thirds of the business, and put him in charge.

    Eddie was a born salesman. As a teenager, he’d cut school to hawk T-shirts and cheap electronics near the Manhattan Port Authority Terminal. Charming and aggressive, Eddie had once gone so far as to block a customer’s exit, pleading with her not to leave until they made a deal. Sales tactics like that earned him the nickname Crazy Eddie. Now he applied those shrewd techniques to his store. He slashed his prices and guaranteed that he would beat any competitor’s price. He changed the store’s boring name to Crazy Eddie. Then he launched one of the most famous ad campaigns to ever assault New Yorkers.

    Frank Sinatra’s version of New York, New York is played at the end of every Rangers hockey game at Madison Square Garden.

    EDDIE GOES INSAAAANE

    Antar wanted an ad campaign that would bring in customers, and late one night on the radio, he heard the voice that could do it. WPIX disc jockey Dr. Jerry (real name: Jerry Carroll) ad-libbed a Crazy Eddie commercial on his show, and he put an extra bit of oomph in it. He didn’t just say that Crazy Eddie’s prices were insanely low—he shouted that they were IN–SAAAANE!

    Eddie immediately hired Carroll to do all of his radio ads, and when Crazy Eddie expanded into television, Jerry Carroll played a fast-talking, hyperactive Crazy Eddie who shouted about his deals…while jumping up and down, waving his arms, and tearing at his clothing. He might be dressed as Santa Claus or Superman, but he always acted like a lunatic. The ads made such a splash that they were parodied by Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live. And in a memorable scene from the popular 1980s film Splash, Darryl Hannah plays an overwhelmed mermaid who visits Bloomingdale’s and watches in terror as Eddie goes through his schtick on dozens of TV sets.

    The ads did the trick. Customers flocked to Eddie’s stores searching for deals, and were often talked into buying better quality merchandise at a regular markup. Antar expanded his store to a chain of 43, fulfilling his father’s dream of employing his relatives. And during that time, he pulled in about $350 million in sales…or did he?

    EDDIE’S SECRET TO SUCCESS

    It was true that Crazy Eddie sold electronics at lower prices than the competition. But how could Antar do that and still make so much money? The solution: tax fraud. He hired family members (and others) under the table to avoid payroll tax, and when there were cash sales, he kept the sales tax and hid the profits in overseas banks so he wouldn’t have to pay income tax on them.

    Then Eddie realized he could make much more if he inflated the value of Crazy Eddie, made it a public company, and sold its high-priced stock. So in 1980, Eddie and some of his family members started hiding fewer of the cash sales. They did that for three years, gradually adding more cash to the books and making it seem like their profits were increasing enormously each year. Then, in 1984, they turned the stores into a public company and sold stock shares.

    Crazy Eddie stock climbed in value because the company appeared to be so profitable. But in fact, the company was running up deficits of $3 million to $12 million. Eddie’s younger cousin, Sammy Antar, was hired as the chief financial officer, specifically to hide the deficits and create false profits. So he falsified the inventory and used the cash hidden in overseas banks to make phony sales payments to the stores. On paper, it looked like sales were booming. And according to court documents, Eddie Antar raked in about $75 million from the stock sales; his brothers, Mitchell and Allen, made $4 million and $3 million, respectively. But times were changing. Eddie was facing more competition, his stores were losing money, and his scheme was falling apart.

    THE FALL OF CRAZY EDDIE

    Crazy Eddie’s scheme collapsed when a company from Houston decided to take over Eddie’s stores by buying up controlling shares of Crazy Eddie stock. They went over the books and realized that the numbers didn’t match what was in the

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