AMERICAN BEAUTY
Alleva, Richard
MEDIA Celia Wren HONE OF THE WALDORF SALAD PBS's 'New York' N ew York City is so inso- lently immediate, so whet- ted by the present, that it ¦¦Dm is nearly impossible, at least for...
...Times Square, with its tourist hordes and its attention-deficit neon—could the land beneath it ever have indulged in trees...
...MEDIA Celia Wren HONE OF THE WALDORF SALAD PBS's 'New York' N ew York City is so inso- lently immediate, so whet- ted by the present, that it ¦¦Dm is nearly impossible, at least for nonhistorians, to imagine what it was like in ages long past...
...This excoriation is only one of the historical nuggets crammed into "New York," the seductive, hypereducational documentary that airs on PBS in five two-hour episodes November 14^18...
...Quotes from eyewitness accounts, interpreted by actors, and commentary by historians and celebrities (Donald Trump, Caleb Carr), speaking excitedly on camera, accent each...
...That overcrowded deli selling five kinds of bottled water and Mongolian salad-bar fixings—could Thomas Jefferson ever have strolled through that space...
...Well, he did—or at least some space like it—and pronounced the eighteenth-century city to be "a sewer filled with all Commonweal 1O November 5,1999 the depravities of human nature...
...Directed by Ric Burns (co-producer, with his brother Ken, of the acclaimed series "The Civil War"), and produced by Burns and Lisa Ades, the new program zeros in on the Big Apple in the quintessential Burns-brothers manner...
Vol. 126 • November 1999 • No. 19
