Sometimes it does me good to look back at the days when the living wasn't so good. I remember in 1945 the dressing-rooms were gone, the park was in ruins, no stand, nothing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren't really there.
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street.
As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing.
It's sad to see these old buildings go because they have so many memories, and it's a real personal kind of thing when you play these places. It's part of our history just gone.
I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn't been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.
I was really impressed with and excited about being immersed in this world and this time period with 'Fences,' being able to walk the neighborhood, and it looks exactly like the 1950s.
People predicted in the 1910s that live theater was going to be all gone and that we'd just be watching movies. No, live theater is still around, because it does things that are specific to it.
When the world changed, people were different. Towns closed, cities were boarded up, communities abandoned, their governments collapsed. They seemed to have no qualms that were obvious to you or me about walking away from what they called a useless pile of rubbish, and never looking back.
In the middle 1940s... I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be.