Manhattan Cable

The installation was just the beginning

I lived in New York City in the 1980s, first on the Upper East Side and later on East 26th Street between Second and Third Avenues. It was a storied neighborhood— Herman Melville had lived a block away, in the townhouse where he wrote Billy Budd; Park Avenue South was a hotbed for great Indian food as well as street prostitutes; and Bellevue Hospital was releasing hordes of mental patients back into the wild, including a shirtless schizophrenic man on my corner who liked swinging a baseball bat perilously close to the heads of pedestrians so inured to street people that they barely paid attention. There was never a dull moment.

In those days, cable television was relatively new and had few alternatives. To schedule an installation took forever, and the window for arrival typically spanned an entire day, or sometimes not at all. Being home for the appointment was so freighted with anxiety that after spotting a Manhattan Cable truck parked on the block in both of my neighborhoods, I ran up to the driver sitting inside to make sure I hadn’t missed him. On both occasions, the drivers had baggies of marijuana on the seat next to them, which they were measuring into smaller packets (apparently, great entertainment was not the only thing getting delivered).

After setting me up, the installer wandered down the hallway of my apartment building with a computer printout in one hand and a pair of wire clippers in the other, slicing the cable of anyone with a lapsed account, or who had hacked a splitter onto someone else’s line.

Cable was notable for its public access programming—an arrangement recognizing that it was a monopoly and requiring it to give equal time to local shows. I volunteered in the video department at Riverside Church in those days, where we taped Sunday services with lefty preacher William Sloane Coffin and ran them on cable channel C. There also were fortune tellers, Indian mystics, and old weird people playing the organ.

On channel J, meanwhile, time was leased to run programming for a small fee. It was in this odd backwater that I discovered Midnight Blue, where Screw Magazine publisher Al Goldstein weighed in on important first amendment matters of the day; Interludes After Midnight, which billed itself as “the first nude talk show”; The Robin Byrd Show, whose sketchy host interviewed and dallied with a panoply of porn stars; and, The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex and Violence. Its eponymous host, “broadcasting from the Polish penthouse,” wore gold lamé hot pants and walked around the city with a TV camera and an Apollo 11-sized backpack bearing an early portable video recorder.

George’s shtick, which originated in the 1970s, included walking up to well-upholstered women on the street in broad daylight and inveigling them into taking off their clothes on camera. Inexplicably, they did, stepping into alleys, nooks and vestibules, perhaps a frustrated secretary from the outer boroughs whose virtue went squishy at the prospect of appearing on television (a rare opportunity in those days). George’s guerrilla antics developed a cult following that earned him interviews with celebrities like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as well as local politicians opining about free speech.

My fellow Americans, this land was your land 40 years ago, a time before everyone had a smart phone, a TikTok account, or the number for Gloria Allred. Still, it wouldn’t be long before everyone on earth was exposing their peculiarities on camera without the benefit of curation from the likes of Ugly George, or even Bob Saget.

Manhattan Cable quickly lost its ability to shock, or even to command my attention. It became part of the only-in-New York woodwork occupied by CBGB’s, the Purple People, or Keith Haring wielding a can of spray paint in the subway, tokens of a wonderful town where you could get clobbered by a schizophrenic with a baseball bat, whip off your blouse so you could become famous, or pass a guy on the sidewalk in gold lamé hot pants who had just walked out of the Manhattan Cable public access studio. It felt a little bit like freedom.

© 2022 David Potorti