“Rooting for the
Titanic”
As a follow up to his essay about Ed Koch “cleaning up” Fifth
Avenue, Leonard gives us a history of the famous shopping district…reminding
us, ironically that the avenue connects Harlem to Greenwich Village. He makes
the point that the avenue was built by “…stock-swindlers, price fixers, slumlords, politician-bribers,
Indian killers, union busters, copper kings and anti-semites who had to be
taught to eat with a fork.” The current denizens would probably fit into those
descriptions as well.
He has a funny line about the rich and famous who lined the
avenues (e.g. the Astors), “Their children went mad, or sank in the Titanic…while
my potato-famine Irish grandfather was rooting for the iceberg.”
New word: lumpen = short for lumpenproletariate, Marxist
term for those that will likely never achieve class consciousness.
New learning: “During
the Civil War, draft rioters –a mod of people, your basic lumpen, who couldn’t
afford a substitute to carry their swords into battle at Gettysburg- burned
down the Colored Orphan Society at Forty-Third and Fifth.”
Fifth Avenue...A= The Center of the Universe, an coincidentally where the draft rioters burned the orphanage:
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