New York Works is a vibrant series of audio portraits of New York characters plying dying trades, like the knife sharpener who still makes house calls and one of the city’s last water tower builders. Though recorded in 2002, the show’s charming portraits of a vanishing New York are more timely than ever – and, in case you missed it, they can be now listened to online.
One vignette covers a day in the life of Walter Backerman, a seltzer delivery man who inherited the business from his father, who in turn inherited it from his parents, who started the business in 1919. Now in his fifties, Backerman (pictured) has been a seltzer man his whole life, except for an aborted stint in law school. He acknowledges his profession “was anachronistic 30 years ago; now it’s like a resurrected ghost”. But loyal customers like Bronx resident Mildred Blitz – whose grandparents bought seltzer from Backerman’s grandparents – wouldn’t have it any other way:
I mean the seltzer is great, but it’s Walter. That’s the thing about his product. He’s the product. It’s not the seltzer, it’s Walter. He talks about retiring, I get sick. While we’re on the subject, would you like a glass of seltzer? I could make you a seltzer with chocolate and milk. What’s sad now is the seltzer that’s being sold in the supermarket doesn’t come close. It doesn’t have the taste; it’s nothing. When you open the top it fizzles a little the first time and then it dies, a horrible death. Ich, it’s awful.
New York Works also visited the Bronx workshop of Cali Rivera, one of the last handmade cowbell manufacturers in the world. Rivera demonstrates the difference between his cowbells and a factory-made bell: THUNK THUNK THUNK. “That's a dead bell, this is ready to do to sleep.” Another winner is the afternoon spent with the late "Brassiere Maven" Selma Koch, owner of the Upper West Side’s Town Shop, who passed away at 95 a year after the show was recorded:
