New York's sparkliest town square.
An oral history of 30 Rock's tree.
Good morning everyone. I hope you all had a peaceful weekend. I went on How Long Gone on Saturday morning, if you want to listen to that. I got a screener of Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, and watched that last night. Pamela is really wonderful, I hope she gets more roles from this.
In today’s letter we have: the sad news I overheard on the second floor of Bergdorf Goodman yesterday, Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert on the importance of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree (Le Rock is charging $400+ for an open bar on Wednesday), and Alex Cooper’s new venture.
For the month of December, Feed Me will be featuring a daily holiday gift — usually suggested by Emily, sometimes suggested by someone else. In addition to this advent calendar-style gift guide, there will also be the occasional Christmas surprise.
Ugg Slippers:
There are parts of me that are so basic, you could not fathom. I like drinking shitty white wine in bed while watching The Office. I like taking my morning walks to pilates in a sherpa jacket, and getting a latte on my walk home. And I am bananas about my Ugg Slippers.
They make my feet warm, they’ve lasted four years, and when I pace back and forth on phone calls, the rubber sole assure me that they’re not pajamas — I could run an errand in the outside world while wearing these and my feet wouldn’t get snowy or wet. When I run up and down my building’s stairs to sign for packages, I don’t slip. And most of all, they give me a sense of place. An unusable holiday gift is a grave sin to me, and I use these almost every day of the year. They only make my days better.
Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert is helping me build a modern Metro Section. Last month he wrote about Manhattan’s new casino project and the Staten Island ferry. The Anonymous Transit Expert has to stay anonymous because he has a Real Job in a Real Office, but you’ll be seeing more of him around here in his series, Stand Clear.
ROCKEFELLER CENTER IS JUST A TOWN SQAURE
As my family gathered around our Thanksgiving table last week, I recounted in too much detail, as I will now again, my experience trying to sneak a Midtown after-work cocktail off before decamping for the long weekend. Approaching Sixth Avenue and 50th St. from the east, I slammed into the beginnings of the annual holiday crowd, gazing up and ambling crosswise through Midtown’s town square, without a concrete plan for what they’d be up to next. On being seated and profusely apologizing for necessitating what I now knew was a journey fraught with mob-dodging and sharp elbows, my friend and I recounted which of our families’ customs we were looking forward to (or dreading), and I can say confidently that between us, no turkey trots were run.
Growing up, my family insisted on the custom of making Black Friday a daylong excursion with the singular goal of procuring the perfect Fraser fir to fill the family room for the next month. We’d pile into my mother’s Volvo, later the minivan (I’m one of five), and set out to the bring-your-own-saw tree farm to fell the chosen fir ourselves, returning home to decorate and gorge ourselves on leftover stuffing and pie. As my siblings and I grew older, the day was rolled back from a full-freight adventure to a trip to the garden center. To this day all are encouraged to be in attendance. With the benefit of hindsight, this tradition made for easy Christmas Card fodder and probably contributed to my still-held indifference to Black Friday as a shopping holiday. The day was and remains designed to be about all of us, centered around our little shared space.
“The tree got larger and more adorned through the boom fifties. It was at its largest, physically, in 1999, mourned with the City in 2001, and has spent the balance of the 2000’s becoming more adorned, luxurious, and co-branded.”
The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, the object of any absent-minded gazing I might do during December, was at its genesis designed by and for the men constructing the complex and their families. In the throes of the Great Depression, workmen collected funds to erect their own fir in what was then their living room (and is now a Todd Snyder store), and it became the center of the site during the cold winter. On completion, the PR apparatus of the private town square that Dutch Architect Rem Koolhas forty years later called a “masterpiece without a genius” took up the tradition and raised their own larger fir. This yearly spectacle repeats uninterrupted, and reflects the spirit of the season back at us. It lost its lights in the forties with the rest of New York. The tree got larger and more adorned through the boom fifties. It was at its largest, physically, in 1999, mourned with the city in 2001, and has spent the balance of the 2000’s becoming more adorned, luxurious, and co-branded - what started as handmade cranberry garlands became a half-ton Swarovski star in 2019, and since 2007 it’s become lumber for a Habitat home at the end of its service. It has a television show. You can watch it Wednesday, if you like Kelly Clarkson.