The Next Generation of Wallachs Says Goodbye to Gotham

New in town, Brooklyn, September 1980

Members of my family are drawn to New York City. It’s an old story, going back to when my great-great-grandfather Adolph Lissner moved to New York from Germany in 1854. He became a citizen in 1860—I have a microfilm copy of his 1860 naturalization certificate. A death notice in the New York Times of January 21, 1914 said he served with Troop E, Third Regiment, New York Cavalry in the Civil War.

Other family members would follow. My father lived there from 1967 to 1978, then me from 1980 to 1991, and most recently my nephew Tyler, from 2010 to, well, last week, when he left New York to return to Houston. I’ve done the math—we all stayed for 11 years then decided the time had come to say good-bye.

The typical attractions drew us to Gotham. A fresh start, careers, romance, adventure, creativity, getting out of small-town America or repressive Europe. My father left Grand Rapids, Michigan with his second wife for a career as a self-employed industrial designer, engineer and bon vivant. He finally ran out of money and moved to suburban Nyack, New York. He lived in the same apartment on on Gedney Street on the shore of the Hudson for 40 years until he died in 2018.

I got the big-city bug from visiting my father and his wife in the 1970s with my brother when they lived at 220 E. 63rd Street. We arrived wide-eyed from Mission, Texas, a small town on the Rio Grande. After picking us up at LaGuardia, Dad took us on the Circle Line tour. I was hooked on the place and kept coming back while in high school, despite my troubled relationship with my father. I moved to Brooklyn a week after I graduated from Princeton in 1980 for a job as a reporter-researcher at Forbes magazine. That start on a communications career swiftly cratered as I was way out of my depth with Forbes' hyper-aggressive journalism. I went from Princeton to Forbes to a trade magazine called Quick Frozen Foods to an unemployment line within three years.

I could have gone home at any time, after job losses or my mother’s cancer diagnosis, but I hung on. My inner action junkie thrived on affordable apartments (a $300/month studio on Amity Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn), the Jewish scene, the personals section in New York magazine and no obligations, not even a house plant. I did freelance writing, searched for romance and traveled to places like Australia, Europe, Israel and the USSR. I finally found a steady job and that long-sought romance in the magical summer of 1987, then got married. The crack craze and the desire for suburban family life sent us packing to Connecticut in 1991, 30 years ago. My then-wife and I delighted in driving our used Saab to the Caldor department store (you must remember Caldor) and supermarkets to shop. No longer were we lugging groceries and laundry up the apartment stairs in a rolling cart!

Tyler and several theater friends moved to the city as a group after they graduated from Texas State University in San Marcos. After seeing Tyler star as Bobby in a college production of  “Company” in 2008, I knew he had the skills and personality to make it in the Big Apple. And he did, just not in theater. After appearing in “The Drowsy Chaperone” in Brooklyn, he pivoted to self-taught graphics work, starting with adhesive stickers and hustling all the way to high visibility as a queer artist with a website for his brightly colored fashion and art line, murals at Art Basel in Miami, exhibits at the Brooklyn Brewhouse and the Rag & Bone fashion chain, and a stint as artist in residence at Barneys department store (you must remember Barneys) when it still existed. I documented as many of the events as I could, as the historically minded uncle with a camera coming in from the ‘burbs.

But after 11 years, Tyler has decided to move on and move back to Houston. That's his story to tell. I wish him all the best in taking his show back on the road. Living in Fairfield and Westchester Counties, I never cut the cord so boldly; instead, I spent 20 years commuting to Grand Central, keeping one foot firmly planted in the city to feed my action junkie jones until the pandemic ended all that.

Still, the appeal of bright lights, big city continues. What started with Adolph Lissner in 1854 never stops. The latest generation of Wallachs living down on a ranch in Texas might very well be inspired by Uncle Tyler and wacky Great-Uncle Van to see what all the fuss was about. Pre-schoolers now, they could be the starry-eyed Brooklyn hipsters of 2040. I hope to be around and welcome them. Just wait until they hear about my $300/month studio in Cobble Hill! 

Bon voyage dinner at Havana Central, August 9, 2021

Notes from the Libraries' Media Departments

I have long been a passionate patron of library sales. They can be spectacular, those treasure houses in  Westport, Katonah, Wilton and Southport’s massive days-long Pequot Library sale. I’ve attended these for decades and can remember where I found some of my favorite buys. I scooped up books in Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, and a gigantic coffee-table-covering novelty, Leslie's Official History of the Spanish-American War from 1899.  

In recent weeks I’ve enjoyed the twice-weekly sale right here at our own Katonah Village Library. My full attention goes to the CD sales racks. Ever since I got a Victrola multimedia player on my last birthday, I can finally play CDs, vinyl and cassettes all day long, and I do. The library sale and the price of 10 CDs for $4 freed my inner consumer, so I now have relieved the library of at least 25 CDs, mostly Latin, jazz (lots of Bill Evans and Nat King Cole), some Israeli, plus CDs by the Grateful Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Confederate Railroad. Confederate Railroad—now there’s a transgressive band name that sounded a little jarring for Katonah.

  

I’m happy to do my bit to support the library. It’s in a financial squeeze, so buying CDs helps keep the lights on. Still, I’m unsettled to think that all these CDs are for sale because nobody’s checking them out any more. They’re just taking up space. This shows how libraries are a prime signal of technological and social change. Online listening has become so prevalent that libraries are ditching CDs, a trend that goes back to the late 1990s with Napster and kept on going. With budgets pinched, libraries put the money where it brings patrons in. and if nobody’s grooving on the Grateful Dead or the New Riders of the Purple Sage except us senior citizens, they are shifting the resources to something else.

I wonder, though, about the long-term trends. Will users’ preference for everything digital ultimately make libraries become a nonprofit model of the retail experience, where you go to stores to sample and shop, then buy online? 

Fruits of the hunt for cool tunes. 

Fortunately, the Katonah library still stocks DVDs. Getting movies at libraries seems common now, but at one time there was a huge legal question about whether libraries could loan out movies, at the time in the VHS format. I worked for Video Store, a video retailing magazine from 1987 to 1995 and followed the issue. Ultimately, libraries could loan out movies, first in VHS, now DVD. As the video retailing industry collapsed (remember Blockbuster?) libraries became the last man standing in video retail. And truth be told, you get more variety from a multi-branch library system like Westchester County than streaming services. That’s especially true with my favorite genres, like film noir and foreign movies. Some of the greatest films I’ve ever seen came from libraries—Daughter of Kheltoum, set in Algeria, Alexandra, a Russian movie set in Chechnya and film noir like Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum. The Westport, Connecticut library even stocked the Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow), which was seized by the U.S. Customs Service, banned in Boston and the winner of major First Amendment lawsuits. From banned in Boston to available in the public library, that's social change in action.

Libraries also became a necessity for me in keeping up with cultural trends. In years past I had a low level of cable TV service, sticking to basic cable, so I didn’t get Mad Men on AMC, much less The Sopranos on HBO. As a result, I could only find them at the Westport library, waiting YEARS after episodes appeared on TV for seasons to finally reach libraries in DVD sets. In these days of instant streaming and availability of everything, it must sound bizarre to wait until the library gets DVDs of these series, but I’m a patient man and I waited.

So call me old-fashioned, but I’ll be going to the Katonah and other libraries as long as they’re around. I like flipping through newspapers and magazines that I can hold more than I want to read them online. I like checking out armloads of CDs if I can find some I really want. What’s the next tech or social lurch to be reflected in libraries? Your guess is as good as mine, but they’ll keep coming. And please— support your local library! Make a donation and buy up books, DVDs and CDs that catch your fancy. Let me know if you find any Latin or Brazilian CDs and maybe I'll buy them from you.