What Was Out The Window?
The place: Marvel Comics Editorial Offices, 6th Floor, 575 Madison Ave located between 56th and 57th Streets.
Madison Avenue… Around this time, two major new buildings were being built right across the street from Marvel. The AT&T building and the replacement IBM Building. I say ‘replacement’ because the nice old clunker I grew up with had been razed and a whole new gleaming edifice was slowly going up. They had started digging the foundations in 1979.
But today was unlike other days—there was some kind of parade.
View to the South!
View to the North!
And! What do you do during a parade down the center of the street?
Throw streamers! Yay! Except we didn’t have any streamers… or wait, yes we had one single streamer!
Most of a roll of toilet paper! Yay!
Now, guys and gals, I forget everything about this. What the parade was, who’s hanging on to that toilet paper down there. Who thought of it. Nothing. I can barely pick out who’s who—in the upper pic, the winsome smile belong to Martha Conway, John Romita Sr’s Secretary. In the middle picture, the baby-faced male is Statman Stalwart, Stu Schwartzberg.
At a wild guess, because I think that is a black person doing something at the end of the toilet paper, the person above the duo could be funnyman Lance Tooks. There just weren’t too many black people at Marvel to choose from. And that figure is a bit fuller than Chris “Jim Owsley” Priest. I think in 1981, Lance was an intern—could have made the grade to being Editor Tom DeFalco’s Assistant.
There you have it, then. What was outside of the window? Toilet paper.
Of Architectural Note: That block wide hole in the ground is the home of the future AT&T Building! Controversial at the time because it had a very different silhouette. World famous architect Philip Johnson, designed it to look like a grandfather clock. Nowadays, of course, technology and changing tastes allow a great many strange new silhouettes! Of secondary interest, because I didn’t manage to get any pictures pointed that way, is that right across the street was another hole in the ground! That was to be the replacement IBM Building! Over the 3 years they were building both buildings, the work slowly raised up in the background of many of my pictures!
And just look at those open windows! Yuck! They needed re-caulking! But that they did open meant we could have noisy, diesel exhaust laden recently-fresh air in the Summer!