Park Avenue Shooting and NYC ...

 

So this dude just walked right up with an assault rifle out in the open and nobody saw it/did anything until he got inside?

What the ???

So I've only been to Manhattan once in my life, and I hope to go again.

It was 1986, during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on a school theater trip. For a little naive suburban Cincinnati girl, at the time, it was eye-opening - but I loved it.

One of the things I remember most was there was a cop stationed at almost every corner in midtown back then - which apparently they don't do anymore.  

Maybe because they have cameras everywhere now - but cameras don't stop men on a mission. Neither do cops already inside the building, rather than on street corners, watching everything they see coming.

I think this is a poor decision, not only for reasons such as this, but because your neighborhood cop knows the neighborhood and vice versa - he's a part of the community, and thus he's twice as likely to protect it because it becomes personal - which also would help.

They're less likely to shoot people they see every day and know, right? 

Plus street-corner cops again can't hurt community relations with cops in this day and age?

In situations like this, the cop on the corner would radio in what he sees and the cops are there within minutes, right? 

With cameras, you're lucky if somebody's actively watching, so somebody just reviews footage later and cops in the building are anticipated by the shooter - cops on multiple street corners are far enough away to see them coming.

I distinctly remember cops on the corner, back then, talking to the locals, but always watching.

They ignored the people smoking weed right behind them. They ignored the crazy lady running in between cars, screaming "No!" at them. That's just a normal Tuesday in NYC 😂

Instead, they were looking for something else - something they considered even more dangerous - someone like that dude.

Now, this next part is sort of random, it just popped in my head, but it's why I remembered that cop so well - so I'm adding it here, perhaps to not end this post on such a sad note?

Don't get me wrong, what happened was horrible - it's just part of my memory of that visit/cops on the corners back then.

So the cop and the guy he was talking to were at the next corner, across a side street we were waiting to cross. I guess the guy he was  talking to was a local shop owner because he wore an apron.

Regardless, both men shouted across the side street we were crossing, "Hey, how you doing?"

Now, being from the Midwest (and South), we weren't used to people shouting their salutations across street corners.  😂

Plus we were all walking with our group and our teacher and chaperones told us not to make eye contact talk to strangers.

However, considering one of them was a cop, we smiled and nodded at this strange sort of welcoming committee, while waiting for the light to change and cross over to where they were.

Shopkeeper Guy: "Ay, where you's guys from?"

David: "Cincinnati"

Shopkeeper Guy: (In the most NYC accent you can imagine) "Ayyyyy, 1, 2, 3, Cincinnati, all right!" 

Now, David - who was closeted gay at the time, being the 80s - walked ahead of us, and the shopkeeper guy leans over to my two girlfriends and me and says ...

Shopkeeper Guy:  "Ey, he walks sexier than you do, eh? But dat's okay, this is New Yohrk, baby! Hey, you's guys have fun, be safe, all right? " 

Then he went back talking to the cop. 😂

My friend - who later came out - heard him and turned around with a wink and we all laughed. 

NYC is where theater people belong, it was our mecca 😂

So of course, we went to see shows both Broadway and off-Broadway - we saw Cats, of course, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Tony winner that year), Little Shop of Horrors, and Arsenic and Old Lace with Jean Stapleton and Polly Holiday.

We took the NBC tour at Rockefeller Center, saw the Rockettes, and Bryant Gumbel - the Today Show anchor at the time - walked right past us.

We stared at him starstruck like idiots.

(I wanted to ask him to introduce me to his co-anchor, Jane Pauley, a hero of mine, but I refrained.)

We saw the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which was awesome - I advise everyone to see that at least once in your life!

And Amy Grant, another hero of mine at the time (for what reason I don't know) waved to us from her Macy's float 😂.

We had a Thanksgiving Dinner together in a local Art Deco diner, which was awesome!

Otherwise, we saw the usual, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.

We stayed in kind of a dump near Times Square, but we didn't care. We ate at the McDonald's there and I remember that a Big Mac, Fries, and a coke costs what it does now - about $12 bucks in 1986 (compared to about $4 bucks back home)!

We briefly went to 42nd Street for just a quick look because at that time, it was really run down and full of shady peep shows and "massage parlors" in the 80s. (I understand it's come up again somewhat now.)

(Ms. Knotts also wanted us to see what the world was really like outside of suburbia, both the good and the bad, but only briefly on the bad.)

We went to Greenwich Village to see some art exhibits and and shop at artsy stores and record shops.

And we went to see Trump Tower, which had just been built on 5th avenue 4 years earlier.

Honestly? 

Even though I was from the sheltered midwest  - I distinctly remembering thinking it was tacky, a faux-gold shrine to himself, even back in 1986! 😂

Too much shiny faux gold everywhere, like something that belonged in Las Vegas instead of NYC, especially on the inside.

Kind of a foreshadowing of who Trump the man was - flashy, fake gold and tacky on the outside, even worse on the inside, right?

Give me the Art Deco and Art Nouveau stuff any day, over 80s skyscrapers!

In fact, the only thing I liked about it were the trees on the outside ...

Only because they were the only trees in Manhattan except for Central Park! 😂

I know, all of that is random and neither here nor there, but I guess memories were sparked by this, right?

Great memory - the best of my senior year. 😊

That is because I was living away from home with a friend's family, my senior year of high school, and I wouldn't have gone if my theater teacher hadn't called and begged - actually harassed my mom - to help pay for it. 

(I put in $50 from my job at Baskin Robbins, the school putting in  the most after a fundraiser for the trip, benefitting myself and 1 other student who couldn't afford the trip, and I think my mom finally put in $200, after Ms. Knotts basically harassed her for a couple of months 😂)

Ms. Knotts originally didn't care much for me, being originally a fundamentalist Christian (she was a former nun who left the convent and became a liberal), but realized what had happened with my mom and we got a tad bit closer that last year - as much as I would allow because I didn't trust adults much then. 

I think she told me my mom spent most of her time trying to convince her what an evil piece of shit I was, so she said to her ...

"Regardless of how badly you think of her, I've had her in some class of mine every day for the last 4 years.  She barely said a word for 2 years in class, unless it was a part she was playing, but just over the last year, she's starting to come out of her shell. She has a lot of friends and is actually very funny. She's a good kid, doesn't drink or smoke or do drugs, never gets in trouble." 

"She's just trying to get all perspectives before making decisions, and there's nothing wrong with that. Let her see life outside of the little world she knows, just one time? 

I promise I'll make sure she doesn't do anything you'd disapprove of. This is a former nun, talking, remember. 😂Didn't you ever have a time in your life you wanted to know what else was out there? She's almost 18."

My mom actually didn't care what happened to me, after she kicked me out - which, mind you, was because I wanted to visit my Dad in Florida.

Well, not JUST because I wanted to visit my Dad, but because I stupidly told her that I wanted to hear his side of things, now that I was older, because I had noticed some stuff myself.

When I returned, she had my bags packed.

Short ending to that part of the story, I discovered that both of my parents are incredibly effed up, as I would be without years of therapy, and I'd rather be raised by wolves, so I kept living with friends my senior year 😂

Though my dad lied easier than he breathes, not everything he said was a lie.  However, his way of handling her particular brand of  severe mental illness that dipped into psychosis was to beat the shit out of her, revealing his own brand of severe mental illness.

But I had at least both sides of the story now, a trend I continued with people and situations for life - when possible, always get both sides of a story before you make a decision 😊

So she didn't care what happened to me, but what she DID care about  was that a teacher, church pastors, and my friend's parents were starting to catch on - not because of anything I said, like she thinks - some stuff they said they'd noticed they wouldn't even share with me because they said I needed to figure it all out myself, but that she was not a well woman. 

Regardless, that was perhaps the one and only time, until college, a teacher even noticed me/tried to help - and I never forgot it and am grateful. 😊

Sorry about that, folks - hadn't thought about that in a long time, memories come up and I just go with it and write them out and be done with it, as they do.

Back to my point - think about bringing those community street-corner cops back, NYC and elsewhere?

They won't stop everything, but it helps foster community relations  - less cops and community as adversaries - plus they see much that way and can alert immediately rather than watching camera footage later?