We’re spending the weekend in New York City, and while I’m the one of the two of us that tends to want to limit my travel to New York City these days, I’m really glad we came. Besides the obvious pleasure we’re getting in seeing our friends who we’re coming to celebrate a 70th birthday for, the weather in New York has decided to cooperate with some magnificent, crisp, late October weekend weather with the sun shining and a chill in the air that reminds me of all the things I like about the change of seasons and none of the things that we all dread about the coming of winter.
As usual, we’re staying at the Cornell Club at 44th and 5th, and as I’ve said many times, for us it’s the perfect accommodation for these visits for many reasons. It’s familiar, cozy, friendly, and the king size room has just the right amount of space for us, in this case, for a three-day visit. It’s also located perfectly in Midtown, not only convenient to Grand Central for any subway transportation we might be inclined to take downtown or elsewhere, and it’s reasonable walking distance to most of Kim’s old Hell’s Kitchen stomping grounds, but we are particularly fond of being close to Bryant Park, which has sort of become our central hub for activities during these visits. In fact, I’m sitting in Bryant Park right now outside the Bryant Park Grill, waiting for the arrival of both Kim and our dear friends Jeanne and Jon for a long-overdue lunch meeting.
Jeanne was my head of HR for a dozen years of my career at Bankers Trust. I think I first met her in 1990, so over 36 years ago. She is also a dozen years my senior (though you would absolutely never guess she is 85…she looks max 60) and she reminded me that in those days I was thought of as a “baby banker”. In 1990 I was 36 and running a major business line for the bank, so it was less that I was so young (I had been made a Partner at 32), but rather that I was so young to be running a big business. Her prior boss was a decade older than me. Jeanne is a gal from the South, though she has been a solid New Yorker for most of her adult life. I’m not sure which of those histories make her the tough-as-steel woman that she is, but she is all of that and then some, which I found very valuable in that HR role. She never pulled a punch and I could always count on her to tell me if I was being stupid or soft with people. We had a very good relationship while I sense that she always felt that I had a lot to learn, even after a dozen years together. Somewhere along the line I was introduced to Jon, her husband. Jon was a lawyer who worked on Madison Avenue and he became my lawyer for many years and on many issues including all of my venture capital deals and the most protracted of my divorces. I became good friends with Jon and so stayed close to Jeanne and Jon long after Jeanne and I stopped working together. I introduced Jon to a number of my other friends, many of whom have also used him as their lawyer over the years and he is even the executor for the estate of one of those friends. Kim has known them both since we first met and we are all very friendly even though we don’t see each other very often. They have been to many of Kim’s cabaret shows over the years. It was very nice catching up and we made a very genuine offer to have them come stay with us when they come west to visit Jon’s brother, who is a screenwriter in L.A..
After lunch Kim and I found ourselves in good old Bryant Park, where Kim had arranged to meet up with our friend Candace for a mid-afternoon gab session. I had no plans, so I stayed to give my regards to Candace, who is a long-time family friend who knows most of our family and who has occasionally vacationed with us. Bryant Park is, for most of the year, a very serene space in this hectic city. It sits behind the N.Y. Public Library bordered to the south by the start of Herald Square and Macy’s and to the north by 42nd Street and the swooping W.R. Grace building, where HBO used to reside. Whenever I’m in Bryant Park I think about that August evening in 1998 when my film writing debut took place. My short story had been made into a TV Movie (technically ⅒ of an anthology of a movie) by HBO, produced by Rosie Perez, called Subway Stories. I got to sit in the reserved and roped off private party section of the Park while the series premiered on the big outdoor screen for a free viewing by New Yorkers sitting on the grassy lawn. There is something magical about watching your own story on the big screen and having it be a quintessential New York story while watching it in a NYC park on a summer’s eve. It will always be what I associate most with Bryant Park.
The other thing I think of with Bryant Park is the Christmas Winter Village (Holiday Shops). New York has many Christmas fairs and in just Manhattan there are the Grand Central Holiday Fair, the Union Square Holiday Market, the Columbus Circle Holiday Market, the Herald Holiday Market by Urbanspace, Macy’s Holiday Square and the Grand Holiday Bazaar on Sundays on the Upper West Side. There are also a pop-up market in the Oculus atrium in Lower Manhattan and a holiday edition of the Harlem Night Market and probably many more that haven’t hit my screen. Since we gather as a family in Manhattan in early December each year for our holiday get-together, we always spend time at the Bryant Park Christmas Village…its a family tradition. I don’t recall ever seeing it in construction before and here we are less than a week before its opening on October 28th (obviously to capture the Halloween trade as well as Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving and everything in between). Watching the teams of construction workers and shop owners getting their stores and booths ready was all very festive and exciting because the park has chosen not to wall it all off during the process and we literally walked right through all the hub-bub to get to the restaurant. It was certainly a New York moment for many reasons on this fine fall day.
Pushing the holiday season earlier and earlier each year even has a name: “Christmas creep.” The Bryant Park market opening on October 28, before Halloween, is a good example. The main driver is economic. For many retailers the holiday season accounts for a large share of annual sales, and for some the bulk of their profit. Starting earlier spreads that demand over more weeks, eases pressure on inventory and staffing, and gets a jump on competitors. Once one big player moves its start date up, the others feel they have to follow. Several things have sped this up. Black Friday stopped being a single day and turned into a weeks-long “Black November,” and Amazon added October Prime Day events that effectively open holiday shopping in early fall. In 2019, Thanksgiving fell unusually late, and the compressed calendar pushed retailers to start sooner. They never went back. During COVID, supply-chain worries led stores to urge people to “shop early,” which taught consumers to do it. There’s also a psychological side: research on nostalgia and mood suggests that holiday music and decorations put people in a spending frame of mind, so retailers have a reason to bring them out early. The backlash is real too. Halloween and Thanksgiving get squeezed, retail workers face weeks of nonstop carols, and early pressure can make the season feel more commercial and less special. The other side of the argument is that some people actually like a longer season. It spreads out spending and travel, and in a city like New York the markets work as public spaces as much as shopping venues. So “creep” is partly a retail strategy and partly something consumers have shown, through their wallets, that they’ll go along with.