Summer FridaysA guide to enjoying the best of the city every weekend.
On Governors Island, You Can Dance at a Jazz Age Lawn Party
Dancing the Charleston — which you can do this weekend on Governors Island, across New York Harbor from Lower Manhattan — "takes more confidence than skill, I think," Michael Arenella said. He knows how, and there will be moments when he will be doing the Charleston — or the Black Bottom or the fox trot, all dances rooted in the 1920s — to whip up the crowd at the event on Governors Island, the Jazz Age Lawn Party. Arenella, the bandleader and impresario behind this weekend of phantasmagoria, will provide the soundtrack for the dancing, the wine and vintage cocktails that will be available and the croquet that can be played. It begins tomorrow at 11 a.m. and continues on Sunday. There will be Charleston lessons led by Roddy Caravella, whose 1920s bona fides include owning a 1929 DeSoto, according to Arenella, the former owner of a 1925 Studebaker. He himself now has a 1930 Buick. "I modernized," he said. "Got to stay with the times, you know?" The music is also authentic, Arenella said: He transcribed it himself, from 78 r.p.m. recordings of songs like "The Vo-do-deo-do Blues," (Vo-do-deo-do was "a meaningless jazz refrain" from the 1920s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) Arenella is also partial to Duke Ellington songs like "Jig Walk," from before Ellington took the A train and became a household name. It's the sound of the Roaring Twenties, and the Jazz Age Lawn Party also has a look. Some attendees dress as people did in the decade between World War I and the Great Depression. There are slim and sleeveless flapper dresses and feather boas — and seersucker suits and suspenders. But there is more to the Jazz Age Lawn Party than appearances. If anyone has F. Scott Fitzgerald in mind, Arenella does not. "Everyone talks about 'The Great Gatsby,'" he said, "but there was so much better literature that that era yielded, so much literature with much more depth and more culturally relevant that shaped the thought of the era." He mentioned "the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein" before saying that "'Gatsby' was about idle wealthy people. That doesn't speak to the working class and the Black culture of that time, which is where the art was happening and the dance and the music." Arenella started the Jazz Age Lawn Party 19 years ago on Governors Island, a former military outpost that grew in the early years of the 20th century — nearly 4.8 million cubic yards of rocks and dirt excavated for the Lexington Avenue subway line added just over 100 acres to the island's girth. In the Roaring Twenties, Governors Island, still under the Army's control, was the scene of polo matches and mock battles that the public could watch. And it was a place to watch the shape of New York City change as skyscrapers rose across the harbor in Manhattan. "The spirit of the 1920s was one of looking forward," Arenella said. "The 1920s cut ties with the past so quickly and clearly. It created newfound freedom for young people." And that fueled the exuberance of jazz, which, as Arenella noted, was "still considered the underground music" when the 1920s began. The audience changed with the bandleader Paul Whiteman, who he said "made jazz digestible for the quote-unquote upper classes" with "Rhapsody in Blue," which Whiteman commissioned from George Gershwin and which is celebrating its centennial this year. That milestone will be observed at the Jazz Age Lawn Party with a performance of a solo arrangement by the pianist Elliot Sneider. (The composer Ferde Grofé was responsible for three orchestra versions, including the one for the premiere.) "'Rhapsody in Blue' was the soundtrack of American progress, American innovation," he said. "It was the soundtrack of the skyscrapers being built in New York City and the soundtrack of the workingman and woman having mobility. And it's melded with the blues. That's what it is at the Lawn Party. It's the sound of progress, of social suffering, of social striving. It's uniquely American, and something our country should be a lot more proud of." WEEKEND WEATHER While Tropical Storm Debby's power will diminish, prepare for chances of showers and thunderstorms on a breezy Friday and early Saturday. On Sunday, enjoy a mostly sunny day. Throughout the weekend, temperatures will be in the low to mid-80s during the day. At night, temperatures will range from the high 60s to the mid-70s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Tuesday (Tisha B'Av). What Else to Do This Weekend
Exhibits closing on Sunday
Enjoy the great outdoors, with music
For more events in New York, here's a list of what to do this month. We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. A close-by island cruise
Manhattan has its characters, and so do places in New York that are technically uninhabited. My colleague Laurel Graeber writes that Classic Harbor Line offers opportunities to observe them during its narrated Urban Naturalist Tour. On Sundays and Mondays at sunset, a three-hour cruise on a 1920s-style yacht sails past points like U Thant Island, Mill Rock and the North and South Brother Islands. Those are out-of-the-way places where species like ospreys, double-crested cormorants, snowy egrets and various kinds of herons now nest. Binoculars are a must, but if you're lucky, you may see one of these majestic birds swoop just overhead or take off from a channel marker. The tour also covers harbor history, with lore about shipwrecks, the Statue of Liberty and Typhoid Mary, the cook who infected more than 50 New Yorkers in the early years of the 20th century. She was exiled to North Brother Island, which the writer Anthony Bourdain called "a ramshackle Alcatraz" roughly half a mile from another island that houses a real prison, Rikers Island. METROPOLITAN DIARY Volleyball practice
Dear Diary: I was on my way to meet a high school friend for lunch on the Upper West Side and had walked from Midtown through Central Park. Leaving the park, I hustled in the direction of Amsterdam Avenue. I passed the schoolyard outside the Anderson School on the way. I saw some boys playing volleyball without a net, and I watched their ball fly over the very high chain-link fence and land at my feet. I looked at my watch. I had three minutes to get to lunch on time. I placed the ball at the base of the fence. A boy of about 13 locked eyes with me from the other side. "You're going to have to come out and get this," I said. I did not trust my throwing skills. He shook his head calmly. "Please," he said. "Just try." I tried to lob the ball over the fence but failed to make it even a third of the way to the top. By now, a medium-size crowd of middle schoolers had gathered to watch. I could not fail my audience. I looked at the boy again. "Try again," he said, crouching into a deep squat with his arms extended. "Like this." Using this new technique, I tried again. This time, I was just a few feet shy of the top. The crowd was cheering me on. I tried once more, this time with more force, and ball went over the fence. The crowd went wild. I turned and saw an older woman standing nearby who was also cheering. I waved farewell to my fans and hurried off to lunch. I was about 10 minutes late. — Estee Pierce Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Luke Caramanico, Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: Dance at a Jazz Age lawn party on Governors Island
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