Adam:
Great description, & thanks for validating what I had written. I am glad you got to see and experience the last vestiges of the old NYC Machinery District. It is good your girlfriend got to see it as well as the Strasburg RR shops. It helps to have a "better half" who understands guys like us.
Change must, inevitably, happen. I can;t say I like what is happening in the USA, but I have no much chance of reversing things & realize it. Fortunately, I found a niche. Perhaps I am a stubborn dinosaur, but there seems to be a need for me and the work I do.
Having grown up in Brooklyn, in the 1950's and 60's, I remember the old ethinic neighborhoods and the specialized business "districts" in NYC.
As a little guy, it was obvious early on that I liked machinery. Dad used to take me to Canal Street and Center Street on Saturday mornings. We almost always came home with something for me to play around with. It might have been a small instrument gearbox or similar. It was better than an amusement park or mall. We'd walk over to the area where the World Trade Center later stood- that area had a block of shops on Vesey Street that sold liquidated goods, customs-house auction stuff, closeouts and similar. My dad bought me a set of castings for a Stuart Turner Number 4 engine at one of those places. Probably a lot that came out of a customs house auction. It's an engine I am just finishing these 40-odd years later. The survivors of that block emerged as chain stores called "Odd Lot" and "Job Lot". The "Butter and Egg" district was nearby, but we never had reason to go poking around there.
Jim Rozen: The original "Radio Row" was on Cortlandt Street, not far from where the WTC stood. There were rows of store which sold industrial and military surplus electronic gear. Anything from vacuum tubes (it was the 1950's), resistors and capacitors to radio transmitters, receivers, signal generators and oscilloscopes as well as "record cutting" equipment moved through there. I believe "Radio Row" met its end when the the WTC was built.
New York City in the 1950's was a place where you could walk the streets & ride the subways of most areas without fear of getting accosted or mugged. At the same time, it was a place where people had a certain "edge" to them. Perhaps it came from the hard-scrabble immigrant mentality. People "got off the boat" and many landed right there on Lower Manhattan and settled into tenement life. From there, it was a hard life with no way to go but up. The result was people in New York City tended to be quick talking, quick with a comeback and perhaps seemingly confrontational on initial contact. However, it generally was a front and something you "gave back as good as you got". Having some "comeback" which might mean trading a few good-natured insults, and hard bargaining were all part of that immigrant culture. Simiarly, the immigrant kids and the kids of my parent's generation knew the only thing to do was scrabble hard. Some did it by their wits, hustling in businesses. The old machine tools dealers were examples of this. Many more immigrant kids made it by dint of hard study, often on a kitchen table after supper and into the night. These were kids who studied hard, went to public elementary and high schools that were old even then, came from homes and neighborhoods where English was not spoken, yet they preveailed and went on to become professionals such as teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, dentists, architects... My parents were part of that generation.
I have seen this same sort of progression today with the new waves of Asian, Caribbean and Hispanic immigrants. They are the new generations of street peddlers, small storekeepers, and it is their kids who are studying hard and getting scholarships.
As for the New York City of today, former mayor Guiliani did a fine job of "cleaning it up". Guiliani's cleanup took the edge and gittiness off the city. When my wife and I went into New York City after a lapse of some years, were were surprised at how calm and polite everyone was.
What Billy Boy may have ran into at Grand Machinery was some of the "old time" New York types. This was the type who were used to hustling and bargaining. You never bought a machine tool, or anything much else, for the "sticker price". You looked hard at any machine tool they had on the floor, asked to inspect it, and took your time. If you were interested, you asked the price and the machinery dealer threw out a number. You never took that number, you kidded him about maybe having to put his kids thru school and the machine tool being used on the Ark. You threw out a ridiculously low counter offer and it was "let the games begin". If you closed in on a price, you might ask to open a headstock and definitely saw the machine run under power. If it was needed, you bargained for tooling like a vise or chucks. It was all part of the game.
The new waves of immigrants are about the same way with bargaining being a part of the culture. We see it when we go into NY City nowadays.
What is indicative of how NY City has changed is to pay a visit to Katz's Delicatessen. It was a good walk from the old machinery district, being at the corner of Houston & Ludlow Streets on the Lower East Side. Like all the old time Jewish delicatessens, Katz's had outrageously good corned beef (salt beef in the UK), Pastrami, and salami along with great pickles. A sandwich in any of the old time Jewish Delicatessens was something you made a meal out of. When you went into Katz's, right into the 1980's, the countermen were generally older Jewish guys with union buttons on their white uniforms. They sized up the customers and the bantering and up-and-back occurred. You generally came away with a sandwich you needed a forklift to move if you kidded around and "Kvetched" (complained in jest). I remember one time, being at Katz's with my late father. We had each gotten a corned beef sandwich, a potato knish ( a kind of potato pie you pick up and eat), and each had a quart of Schaefer's beer. We were at our table, when the fun began. This character in Con Ed (the local electric company) work clothes started complaining to the bus boy that the meat in his corned beef sandwich was too fatty. The Con Ed guy had eaten about half his sandwich, and chose to complain, expecting a free meal or somesuch thing. The bus boy got a couple of countermen. They took the sandwich away. A few minutes later, they were back with the biggest sandwich imaginable. It needed a front end loader to move. They showed the COn Ed guy the corned beef was all lean, and told him to tie into it. More countermen gathered, some with the big knives they sliced the corned beef with. The COn Ed guy had a cheering section of old Jewish countermen and young Hispanic bus boys yelling at him to eat. Dad and I were kibbitzing with the countermen in Yiddish and I was kidding with the bus boys in Spanish (having worke din South America). The countermen were telling the Edison guy he probably picked up manhole covers int he street, so a little sandwich shouldn;t be a problem for him to eat. The guy was turning red, sweating, and not looking good when he got the sandwich eaten. He was not going to let a gang of old countermen get the best of him. He staggered out and the raucous goings on continued, with kidding and offers of bets as to whether he made it to the curb, collapsed or wound up in the ER. That was the old New York.
I took my wife and kids to Katz's. The corned beef was as good as ever, and the sandwiches were as big as ever. The countermen are now Hispanic or Asian- still slicing the corned beef by hand and stil wearing union buttons. However, the old "give and take" bantering is gone. The countermen are so polite and accomodating as to be unbelievable. It takes something from the experience. My wife and son agreed- the experience was too homogenized, too bland. OTOH, seeing the Asian and Hispanic men working at Katz's makes me realize what a melting pot New York City really is and how times change.
I guess, like the countermen at Katz's, everything changes with the times. Instead of hard bargaining with some oldtime machinery dealer, it's come to shopping for used machine tools on the internet. On used big machine tool purchases, I know the end result is approximately the same. Instead of hopping ont he subway to Center Street, I have hopped on planes to look at used machine tools. Instead of walking from one dealer's store to the next, it has meant hopping planes to different cities to inspect machine tools for purchase. The end result was still a careful inspection, bargaining, and a handshake followed by the purchase.
Maybe locating and buying machine tools via the internet is easier and opens up infinitely more possibilities. I'll still miss the old Machinery District and the types and way of life that went with it.
That wasn't Bill Maher by any chance was it ? It's actually of some comfort to me that comedians are picking up on this problem as is signals more and more awareness of the issue by the general public, which has to be a good thing.
) various insurances have escalated well beyond that percentage, etc and so forth.
