Garden Of Earthly Delights Or The Nightmare · Manhattan by Gordon R. Schwerzmann

New York City in the 1970s and 1980s

Part I: Manhattan

A Memoir of my time during that tumultuous period

Experience New York City in the 1970s and 80s, a time of upheaval and change. In Garden of Earthly Delights or The Nightmare, Manhattan takes center stage, alive and evolving. The author steps aside, letting the city’s raw energy and shifting nature guide the story.

This book uses a deconstructed approach that blends narrative, dream visions, poetry, photographs, history, social commentary, and real adventures. It reveals both the promise and the hardship of an era that shaped countless lives.

A second volume will look at the other boroughs later this year. Join the author in this Remembrance of Things Glorious.

Amazon Amazon Hardcover

Excerpt from Garden Of Earthly Delights Or The Nightmare: New York City in the 1970s and 1980s · Part I: Manhattan © Copyright 2025 Gordon R. Schwerzmann

“I CAN SEE BY YOUR OUTFIT THAT YOU ARE A COWBOY”

Author as Marshall Dillon (age 5)

I used to play a guessing game when I was riding on the subway, without looking at the station signs. If you start downtown on the IRT Local, you see all of these gray flannel-suited guys with matching, Samsonite cases, talking buying this stock or the current interest on treasuries, you know you’re at the Wall Street station in the Financial District. Close your eyes, and when you open them, you’ll see a sea of Chinese faces and hear guttural Cantonese and you know you’re at Canal Street station in the heart of Chinatown. Close your eyes, and when you open them, you’ll see dozens of blue-jeaned, long-haired guys and Guatemalan blouse and tie dye long skirt, flower-power gals, and you’ll know that you’re at Eighth Avenue and Greenwich Village. Close your eyes again and when you open them, you’ll see a deluge of women, carrying a “Macy’s” bag in each hand, that’s 34th Street and Herold Square. You close your eyes, and this time you don’t even have to open them, you’ll hear a babel of many languages. You know this stop is Times Square.

If you doze off and wake up and look around the car and see white flight, the subway version, you know you’re at 96th Street, you look around the car and see a bunch of serious, white guys reading books and pretty girls in trench coats and burets. You close your eyes and when you open them, they’re all gone. You’ll know you just missed 116th Street station, Columbia University. You close your eyes again and when you open them, you’re in a sea of Black faces and heavy southern drawl voices (“But where did all of the white people go?” Melanie Griffith to Tom Hanks in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”), you’ll know that this stop is 125th Street in the center of Harlem.

You can also play this game on the Brooklyn train. When you’re on the “RR,” and you see men with beards and round, black, fur hats, you know that this stop is: “Williamsburg.” When you start to hear unfamiliar Eastern European languages like Lithuanian or Polish, you know you’re in Greenpoint.

If you take the RR in the opposite direction towards Coney Island and with your eyes closed, you hear Yiddish and a strange, antiquated Spanish called Ladino, spoken by Sephardic Jews. Don’t open your eyes yet because now you hear a strange Slavic language: Russian, and you are in “Little Odessa”, which is the Brighton Beach stop. For the next stop all you have to do is see the smiles on the little children, eagerly anticipating a day at the beach at Coney Island, the end of the line.

When you’re on the “F” train, past my stop in Park Slope, you close your eyes and hear the lilting, Jamaican English or the buoyant patois of the Haitian French, this stop is the Brooklyn Museum. These Caribbean voices are joined by Trinidadians and some Yiddish, welcome to Flatbush.

The most difficult to guess is Queens train. The Flushing Line is first eastern European, Polish and Romanian, then Nuyorican Spanish, then Chinese. If you ride the A train all the way to land’s end: Far Rockaway, you hear a babel of African tongues, Ethiopian, Nigerian and Senegalese, now living year-round in the summer beach cottages that the Irish and Italians owned in the 1960’s.

Riding the D train in the Bronx is a completely different adventure and I stopped the closed eyes and guessing game-you had to be totally alert or you might get mugged. But even here you have to train your ear to notice the difference between Puerto Rican, Dominican and Columbian Spanish. Back in the 1920s my grandfather worked building the Holland Tunnel and always fell asleep on the ride back to the North Bronx. The conductor would always wake him up and he’d have to get another train back home. I wouldn’t advise that today, especially since you have to pass through the Fort Apache section of the South Bronx to get to his home in Unionport.

I’ve seen junkies drooling and nodding off. I’ve witnessed shoving fights, name calling, crazed, screaming, delirious men and even surprised two young homosexuals giving each other fellatio in a deserted nighttime subway car. The life that you observe in the subway cars mirrors the reality of the streets above.