The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@xxxxxxxxx /--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ I HEART HUCKABEES - OPENING IN SELECT CITIES OCTOBER 1 From David O. Russell, writer and director of THREE KINGS and FLIRTING WITH DISASTER comes an existential comedy starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Hupert, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts. Watch the trailer now at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/huckabees/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ Sky Above, Hubbub Below August 22, 2004 By WENDELL JAMIESON THE little airplane bobs and dips and yaws in the thermals rising around the southern tip of Flatbush Avenue; you can feel the warm air lifting the riveted aluminum wings. To the right, Brooklyn is stretched out in the haze like a diorama: the houses on Mill Basin with cabin cruisers tied to their docks; the receding avenues; and in the distance, the office buildings of Downtown Brooklyn. Beyond them, Manhattan is two jagged mountain ranges - Wall Street and Midtown. Once the plane gets out over the shiny gray-green water, the ride becomes smoother. Then the pilot dips the wings a few degrees toward land, for a better look. Coney Island is outside the canopy now. The plane is about the height of the yellow tip of the Parachute Jump. It's a hot morning - the weekday beach is surprisingly crowded with little figures. Among them, someone must notice this droning silvery anachronism flying by at the aeronautical snail's pace of 120 miles per hour and know what it is. Maybe it's an airplane-crazy little boy, or maybe it's a man in his 80's who remembers training on one during World War II and recognizes from his deep subconscious the sound of its radial engine. New York is a city of views: we seek them out, we pay more for apartments that have them, we ask to be seated at the rare table with one. We live and work and play down in the city's warrens and crevices, but we like to see it from a distance. New Yorkers go to the top of the Empire State Building with relatives from out of town, gently mocking them, and end up being more impressed than their guests. We sit on a green wooden bench on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and take it all in. Businessmen, no matter how jaded, look up from their laptops as their DC-10 soars above Manhattan at 5,000 feet and admire for a moment their workaholic arena below, spread out in an orange dusk like a prickly carpet of geometric stalagmites. But the best view of New York has got to be that from the back seat of a 1943 North American T6 Texan just 200 feet off the ground, going slow. This is the single-propeller training plane in which tens of thousands of fighter and bomber pilots first soloed 60 years ago. The view is 360 degrees - except for the part blocked by the back of the pilot's head. Everywhere else, there is nothing but city and water and sky. This is not the high-flying businessman's city, beautiful but lifeless, easily delineated. This is a living, animated place; gaining altitude over the eastern tower of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, you feel like you can reach out and grab it. Movement is all around: the cars crossing the span, the nervous-making helicopters above and to the side, the lumbering container ships with their infinite wakes. The Texan is like a time machine of aviation. The world of cellphones and the Internet and unfathomably complicated computers does not exist. The roar of the engine seems to drown out the new century. There's no place to plug in a laptop. And it is clear what the pilot is doing because the wires that control the rudder are visible inside the fuselage, and because every time he leans to one side the plane does, too. His view, with all the workings of New York on display, is a hard one to come by these days, at least since they closed the Parachute Jump. Think of the city from the top of a skyscraper. From 30 stories up, the only movement is the ant people in their yellow ant taxicabs. But from an eighth-floor apartment on, say, Union Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, homes and streets and windows are animated, and the city is no less spectacular, a collection of shapes - the steeple of the Old First Reformed Church on Seventh Avenue, the circular dome of Temple Beth Elohim, the noirish backs of the rectangular apartment buildings facing Prospect Park, the necklace of lights on the Verrazano. This is what the city looked like from the first airplanes, which were in a funny way linked to New York in the public imagination - after all, skyscrapers and airplanes pierced the sky at roughly the same time in history. Perhaps nowhere is this connection made clearer than in the washy brown ceiling mural at 30 Rockefeller Center: buildings rise beneath flights of vapor-trailed monoplanes circling forever upward. The first person who saw New York from an airplane was Wilbur Wright, in 1909. His first test flight was an unannounced hop around the harbor, startling those who happened to see it. Word spread; crowds crammed the waterfront from Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. Then he took off again, going up to 200 feet, buzzing the Cunard liner Lusitania. Today, private planes are allowed to use a small corridor of air from the Harbor up along the Hudson as long as they don't go above 1,100 feet, the realm of the big jets. Northbound planes must stay on the right side of the Hudson, southbound planes on the left. Flying just to the east of the Statue of Liberty in the Texan at 1,000 feet gives what must be the closest approximation of Wilbur Wright's experience that is legally possible today, even though compared with Wright's open biplane of canvas, wood and wires, the Texan is a modern marvel. You are not really above the city, but in it, as in that Union Street apartment (though higher). Opening the canopy, buffeted by the slipstream, the back-seat passenger has the sensation that the buildings are the wooden-block creations of an unusually tall 8-year-old. As the plane travels up the Hudson, it is as if the east-west cross streets of Manhattan are being fanned for viewing pleasure. Down below, a ponderous white Carnival cruise ship waits at a pier next to the aircraft carrier Intrepid, which looks huge from the West Side Highway but small and impossible to land on from right above. And next to that is a truly incongruous sight: a supersonic Concorde, sitting on a barge. It once rattled window panes in Queens; now it is forever earthbound. The public's response to Wright's harbor flights is recorded, but one wonders what the pilot thought when he became the first person to see New York this way. To this taciturn Ohio native, did big, bad scary New York City suddenly seem less threatening from a few hundred feet up? Did it seem somehow manageable, even conquerable? It certainly does today. THREE minutes of low-altitude flight along the eastern coastlines of Queens and Brooklyn present a remarkable panorama of the city's aviation history. First, after being granted special approval, the Texan buzzes Kennedy Airport. The charcoal gray runways shoot into the haze like endless parking lots, the big white jets lined up at either end. (They seem so ungainly - unlike the Concorde - that it's almost impossible to imagine that they can fly.) Baggage carts snake to the terminals, and people movers in different primary colors sit on the sidelines, awaiting orders. The tracks of the new AirTrain tie everything together like shoelaces. Eero Saarinen's Trans World Airlines Flight Center looks even more like a bird about to take flight than it does from the ground, its soaring form suggesting movement as much as all the activity around it. Then the Texan is over Jamaica Bay; the sandy and reedy shores are lined with a ribbon of white, and then blue-green water. The bay is shallow so it never turns dark blue like the ocean on the other side of the Rockaways. Then other runways come into focus. This is Floyd Bennett Field, the city's first municipal airport, which takes up a 1,500-acre swath of landfill in eastern Brooklyn and was opened by Mayor Jimmy Walker in 1931. The disused runways are yellowing and crumbling. The ancient hangars still stand, as does the old control tower, but you can tell from above that they are rundown. A green-bottomed swimming pool sits empty, its diving board presumably no longer used, and massive circular foundations of concrete mark the spots where gun batteries once stood. This is where Howard Hughes landed after flying around the world in 91 hours; where Douglas (Wrong Way) Corrigan took off in a tiny Robin bound for California (or so he said) and landed instead in Ireland; where fighters and bombers took off to sweep the coast clear of U-boats or head to Europe during World War II; and where the planes alighted to shoot King Kong off the Empire State Building. Then there is Coney Island, the faded amusement parks colorful and not-so faded from above, and the Soviet-looking apartment blocks just beyond. Then Brooklyn curves around and flattens out into those endless avenues fading into the haze, and the Verrazano comes into view. FLYING in the Texan up the Hudson at an altitude lower than the top of the Empire State Building, it's not so hard to imagine how a B-25 Mitchell bomber slammed into it in July 1945. From the ground, with all that sky around the building, it seems impossible. But up there you realize that the air above Midtown is as crowded as the streets below. The occasional B-25 still visits New York, piloted down the Hudson by some collector. For the inveterate plane spotter, the skies offer other surprises. On clear summer days, for instance, a group of fliers called the Skytypers bring their Texans over the city in a line-abreast formation to spell out in puffs of smoke advertising slogans and the occasional marriage proposal. The Skytypers live at Republic Airport in Farmingdale, Long Island. Across the tarmac sits the American Airpower Museum, which has a collection of flyable World War II planes. Among them is the Texan that recently flew a loop around the city. That airplane is owned by an optician from Roslyn Heights, Long Island, named Paul Farber. Mr. Farber takes the plane up about once a week or so, tooling around Long Island and the water around it. He doesn't usually fly over the city. After the recent tour, he was asked why. "There's no place to land if the engine quits," he said, smiling. He was thanked for not mentioning that before takeoff. It is a shame he stays away from the city, though, because from 200 to 1,000 feet it has so much more to offer than the leafy suburbs. Its energy is simultaneously revealed and harnessed, and its buildings are taller than they seem from the ground, bothering the sky, just like those in the Rockefeller Center ceiling mural surrounded by that tornado of ascending monoplanes. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/nyregion/thecity/22feat.html?ex=1094267523&ei=1&en=ce7ec0f3ff74fc14 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. 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