Tag: NYC

I’m sitting in P.J. Clarke’s

A neighborhood bar in midtown Manhattan that is known worldwide.  It was a favorite watering hole for the Madison Avenue crowd, back when they constituted a crowd. Lawyers and their clients discussed strategy over oysters. Agents and their artists bickered over percentages.  P.J.’s opened in 1884 and is a time capsule of a bygone New York.  I moved out of the city two decades ago, but just walking through the saloon’s doors on the corner of 55th and 3rd makes this “Old Yorker” feel like a New Yorker.  Today I am here to meet with a former U.S. ambassador. A diplomat, who has dined all over the world and I are about to convene over two BBQ BLUE burgers – with crispy onions! 

My soft spot for this enduring NYC iconic saloon is why I made it a location in my new thriller, Ask Not! 

It was the perfect setting for a 1993 meeting between a free-lance magazine writer and his agent to discuss the biggest break of his career.  Uncharacteristically, the 10 percenter turns down the opportunity to represent him in this “bombshell” article that the writer wants to auction off to the highest bidder.  The writer protests, “But this is history-changing stuff!” Adamant, the agent wants no part of it. In fact, the agent, obviously terrified, tells him to drop it.  

Of the two men seated at actor Peter Falk’s regular table, across from what Nat King Cole dubbed, ‘the Cadillac of burgers,’ one man’s wise decision to opt out is why he lived to enjoy his grandkids. The other not so much…

The Wall

Tom Avitabile | The Wall
Berlin Wall art on exhibit at 53rd St. in Manhattan. Click to enlarge.

In my novel, Hammer of God, a relic of the Cold War war-fighting machine plays a key role in a terrorist attack today. I grew up during the Cold War. It left an indelible mark on me, and probably everyone else who, as part of their school day, had to practice being immolated and turned into nuclear ash. Ostensibly as neat piles under our desks to make the clean up easier or why else have us duck and cover?

An iconic symbol of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall.  An actual concrete wall, which was built after World War II, to split the city into two parts. The East Germans lived on the other side, the side that was connected to the Communists, the Russians or in short, the Enemy.

In later years, when things changed, I remember a factoid that the average East German visitor to NYC dropped $23.22 a day into the local economy. A Japanese tourist spent $989 per day.

The reason for all this nostalgia is that, last night, I went to a restaurant located behind the Berlin Wall!  Albeit a piece of it, now residing in a plaza on 53rd Street in NYC. I was struck by the fact that the cheapest (and there was only one) entree on the menu was $37.50.  My appetizer alone cost my host for the evening, $25.00. So just the first course would blow the average East German visitor’s budget into dust.

That fact caused me to remember that nobody fired a single shot during the entire Cold War! In fact, it ended like a game of Monopoly. The other side just ran out of money.

So as dozens of Christmas Party goers who collectively dropped $1,200 to $1,800 per table on this one part of one night’s entertainment, passed by this huge chunk of concrete on their way in to the restaurant, maybe 1 in 10 knew what the hell it was.  And even smaller odds that it was America’s robust economy that defeated all the nightmares, terrorizing classroom drills and nuclear paranoia that gripped this country no so long ago.

Admittedly the restaurant goers I am writing about are the top end of business folks and well to do revelers and most of them are on expense accounts.  But still the irony was not lost on me.  That even though today America may be heading for a fiscal cliff, years ago we avoided the Wall.

A Split Second to Kill or Be Killed.

On August 24th, through a quirk of fate, I was NOT on my usual 8:40 bus across 34th street that would have dropped me off at 34th and 5th at 9 a.m. Which means, by that same quirk, I was not in front of the Empire State Building on my way to get breakfast on 5th and 30th, at 9:03 when all hell broke loose and a gun battle erupted.

Once again, it’s only fiction ‘til it happens. In my second book, The Hammer of God, when the bad guys take a broadway theater in broad daylight, it starts with a shootout on 47th street. My immediate interest as I was writing was – here are the bad guys and the cops shooting it out, but what about everyone else? What about all the people on the street – the tourists, the street venders, the homeless people. So while I was writing, I made sure that the action was laced with the impact on the innocent bystanders.

On that Friday in August, nine innocent bystanders found themselves in the line of fire. This was totally the act of the gunman, who decided to draw down on two New York City cops in front of the busiest landmark on the earth. The officers had no choice but to defend themselves, and by extension, everybody else on the street. Unlike my drawn out beats and reactions in the dramatic telling of the shot by shot gun battle unfolding in fiction, this actual shootout took less than a few seconds.  Too fast to know what happened even if you were in the middle of it.

In the aftermath however, there was a lot of second guessing. Did the police shoot anybody? Did they do the right thing? Was there another way to handle the situation? Luckily, there was a video tape, and I think it’s all but conclusive that the cops had no choice, this guy drew down on them. He had already killed somebody, and he was a credible threat that had to be removed. I believe six or seven of the nine people injured were not shot, but victims of fragments and pieces of large flower pots which are used to protect the front of the building. (See Photo)

Flower Pots in Front of Empire State Building
Flower Pots in Front of Empire State Building

Two of the injured received wounds – one in the leg, one elsewhere – from a direct bullet.

Now, being fiction, the carnage in the scene in my book, was heavier. It had more gravitas, if you will, because unlike the New York City cops, who had to react in a fraction of a second, I had a couple of months to write the scene. I had the time to make it all work out.

NYPD cops train for all situations, but the majority of the dilemmas these cops, who are posted at the Empire State building day in and day out face are questions from families and kids asking about King Kong. They smile through the answer as they watch the man with the backpack who looks nervous, or imperceptibly twitch when someone makes a fast move to pull out a cell phone while a tourist takes their picture.   Yet on this morning, a normally dressed man, actually someone no more out of place than anyone else who worked in the neighborhood, came to within 1 second of being a mass murderer. I guess, ‘It’s only fiction ‘til it happens’, also covers heroes.