Anderson Cooper's Firehouse Fantasy

Anderson Cooper (b. 1967) is the grandson of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and son of Gloria Vanderbilt, earning him status as a true blue-blood. While there is scarcely a soul alive who does not know that he is gay, he does not talk about such personal details*. He lets Kathy Griffin tease him about it, even while on the air, and he is seen all over NYC riding bikes with his male partner. He has not denied being gay, but he will not discuss his private life publicly.

*UPDATE. Cooper came out publicly July 1, 2012, in a casual, off-handed way by commenting on his sexual orientation in response to a friend's blog post. He now speaks openly about his sexual orientation.

His recent real estate project, however, can lead us to speculate that the silver fox might indulge in a fireman fantasy or two. Cooper purchased the historic Fire Patrol House No. 2, at 84 West Third Street (between Sullivan & Thompson in NYC's Greenwich Village) and then restored it for use as his personal residence. Removal of many coats of exterior paint revealed the original handsome brick, terra cotta and limestone architectural details. The garish red and white paint job on the face of the ground floor was replaced by a more somber black with original limestone accents. The man has taste, and apparently bucketloads of money.

But this was a Fire Patrol House, not a NYC fire department station. In the early 19th century, insurance companies hired citizens to walk about at night to watch out for fires, an idea first proposed by Benjamin Franklin. These Fire Patrol people would spot and extinguish fires, saving insurance underwriters significant payouts. Their fire wagons would deliver heavy tarps to cover broken windows and protect furniture and delicate equipment in order to minimize water damage from fire fighter’s efforts. Among the patrolmen’s duties were water removal and salvage work after a fire had been put out, providing the insurers with an on-site link to the extent of fire damage. Modern inventions such as telephones and electric streetlights made the Fire Patrol largely obsolete, but the tradition prevailed in some cities, with NYC being the last holdout. The city’s fire patrol was not disbanded until 2006.

Anderson Cooper moved into his fire house in January 2012, sharing the deluxe restored quarters with his partner, gay bar owner Benjamin Maisani* (above). Cooper's work crew removed the paint from the brick and stone detailing (above right), including the head of Mercury, which represents the speed at which the fire patrolmen respond to fires.

*UPDATE: In March 2018 Cooper (50 at the time) stated that he and Maisani "had separated as boyfriends some time ago", and that Cooper was seeing a 33-year-old doctor based in Dallas TX. 

Built in 1906, Fire Patrol Station Number 2 had never been updated. When Cooper bought it, the structure still had the original wood flooring, windows, spiral staircase, fire poles and hand-sawn ceiling beams. Even the stables that once housed the patroller’s horses remained intact at the rear of the building.

That was the good news. Over time the fire patrolmen had exercised much-misplaced taste in "improving" the look of their home. The stone sculpture of Mercury above the double entry doors had been painted in flesh-colored enamel with bright yellow hair. The limestone at street level had been painted glossy white with bright "fire engine red" enamel covering the ground floor brickwork. The upper stories' brick, tile and stone façade had been painted over in a dull red. Mr. Cooper had his work cut out for him.

Until 1906 Fire Patrol Number 2 had operated at 31 Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village, but a boarding house at 84 West 3rd Street, one block south of Washington Square Park, was purchased and razed for the construction of a new red brick four-story patrol house.

The façade was embellished by limestone quoins with terra cotta accents, and a carved head of Mercury above the truck entrance signified the speed of the responders. When the fire patrollers moved into their new home in 1907, an elevated railroad covered 3rd Street directly in front of the building (see vintage photo).

During their hundred years at West Third Street, the men engaged in many acts of heroism, but a recent event brought renewed interest in the Fire Patrol system, which in modern times was involved mostly with salvage work at commercial fire sites. Among the emergency responders to the World Trade Center disaster on the morning of September 11, 2001, was 27-year-old fire patrolman Keith Roma. A member of Fire Patrol Number 2, he had worked for over an hour evacuating World Trade Center employees – eyewitnesses estimate that he personally removed more than 200 individuals. Roma himself, however, was never seen again after that day. On Christmas Eve, 2001, his body, with fire helmet at his side, was discovered alongside those of nine civilians he was trying to save. He was the first fire patrolman to die in the line of duty in more than three decades. A plaque outside Fire Patrol Number 2's building honors his sacrifice. Throughout their history, 32 patrolmen had died in the line of duty.

When NYC’s Fire Patrol was disbanded in 2006, the New York Board of Fire Underwriters offered the building for sale. The Greenwich Village Historic Society panicked, quickly requesting landmark status from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Their fears were for naught, because Anderson Cooper hired architect Cary Tamarkin to preserve and renovate the fire patrol house into a private residence.

“We could not be happier with the gorgeous exterior renovation that highlights and respects the unique history of the building,” the Society said in its blog on September 1, 2011. Tamarkin restored the stone and terra cotta detailing, removed the layers of paint and replaced the windows with replicas. The architect retained interior details such as the herringbone brick floor, brass fire poles and cast iron spiral staircase. When Cooper moved in earlier this year, among the original features he retained was the old firemen’s gym, which he outfitted with old-fashioned bar bells and weights. It is a praiseworthy example of the reuse of vintage structures and a fitting testament to the history of the New York Fire Patrol, which had operated in the city from 1839 until 8:00 a.m. on October 15, 2006.

Andrew Goldstein: Ivy League & Pro Lacrosse

Andrew Goldstein (b. 1983) was the first American male team-sport professional athlete to be openly gay during his playing career. He was a goalkeeper for the Long Island Lizards of Major League Lacrosse, but was originally drafted in 2005 – as an out, homosexual athlete – by his hometown team, the Boston Cannons. “Not a single person ever mentioned my sexuality to me,” Goldstein remembered. “It was only about lacrosse.”

During his time as a two-time All-American Dartmouth College lacross goalie, Andrew said: “I have always been an athlete. I just wanted a chance to go out there and play the sport that I love without having to hide my sexuality from my teammates, who are most of my closest friends.” And play the sport he did. Andrew was the first goalie in 30 years to have scored a goal in an NCAA tournament game. Watch him (#6) in action as he scores that goal for Dartmouth against Syracuse:



In a column for OutSports, Andrew wrote about the aftermath of his decision to come out to his team at Dartmouth during the summer of 2003. “It isn’t strange anymore, being the gay one amongst my friends, in my fraternity, on my team. It all happens in one moment, when you realize that the people who care about you will always care about you, and what is most important is to care about yourself. I told myself that I would have to be strong. I thought that people might talk about me behind my back as I walked down the street, and I worried that, on my first road trip this year with the lacrosse team, the unlucky guys who had to be my roommates would complain about sleeping in the same room as the homo. I thought that the first time I walked into the showers after a long practice, the other guys would all walk out or at least ask me to leave.

It didn’t happen like I had planned. I never had to be strong after that first moment. My friends, brothers, and teammates don’t treat my any differently because I am not any different now. I am still the loud one with my friends, the jock in my frat, and the goalie on my team. The only thing that has changed? Now girls are not afraid to approach me in a social setting and put their arm around me or even worse, grab me in an inappropriate place. I waited for people to stare at me or ask me questions or say names but it turns out I was worried about nothing all that time.

On a national level, I knew that news would spread. I wondered how this would affect my status as an athlete, but I found that the preseason honors and expectations only got higher. The world is ready for us. They may not be accustomed to us playing on their fields, dressing in their locker rooms, or taking home their MVP trophies, but when we gain their respect and show that we belong, the transition is smooth. What is new and different scares people. It might be a while before people accept gay marriages and adoptions as normal. But a bright group of 20-year-olds just trying to string together enough wins to take home the Ivy League title for a second straight year really don’t mind if I call up a boyfriend on the phone after a big game.”

Andrew made headlines off the field in 2005, when he was dubbed by ESPN to be “the most accomplished male, team-sport athlete in North America to be openly gay during his playing career.” In 2006, Andrew Goldstein was honored by being named to the OUT 100. He also received a prestigious 2006 GLAAD Media Award for the feature titled 'Andrew Goldstein', which aired on ESPN 's Sportscenter. That same year he left professional lacrosse to pursue a Ph.D. at UCLA.

Goldstein hails from a family of talented athletes. His father and sister played hockey for Brown University, and his brother played lacrosse for Amherst. A biochemistry and molecular biology major while at Dartmouth, Goldstein recently received his Ph.D. in biology from UCLA with a specific emphasis on cancer. Andrew is now a professor at UCLA, where he runs a lab focusing on prostate cancer.

With his professional sports-playing days behind him, Goldstein has turned to amateur gay athletics. It was not easy finding a lacrosse game in Los Angeles, so he returned to ice hockey. He played with the Los Angeles Blades for several years, and Andrew won a gold medal in ice hockey playing with a Toronto-based team at the 2010 Gay Games.

Now Goldstein regularly works the speech-making circuit, talking directly to athletes and coaches. His new challenge to gay athletes and allies is simple: “Coming out isn’t enough anymore, you’ve got to get in the trenches, talk to more coaches, athletes and administrators and affect real change.” His partner, Jamie, is a TV writer – not much of a sports fan – but he supports Andrew in his athletic endeavors and his advocacy against homophobia and homophobic language in sports.

What follows is from ESPN's Sportscenter, the finest TV produced segment about gay athletes that I have seen. Please share it with your families and friends.

Hart Crane

The 32-year-old poet was a passenger on the SS Orizaba, sailing to the U.S. from Mexico, where he had been serving a Guggenheim fellowship post. His father, who had invented Life Savers and was a successful candy manufacturer, had died the year before. The poet had been waiting for an inheritance from his millionaire father, but just learned that the family fortune had been sucked away by debt and losses at the onset of the Great Depression. The poet too often dealt with this and other complications in his tumultuous life by taking solace in alcohol. He was leaving behind Peggy Baird, the former wife of a close friend, with whom he had the only heterosexual affair of his life. They had even talked of possible marriage and a new beginning.

But alcohol regained the upper hand. His grand design of writing an epic poem abut the Aztecs had resulted in a mere handful of verses, so he was coming home nearly empty-handed in late April, 1932. Although he was revered by the likes of Tennessee Williams and other prominent writers, he felt his career and personal life were failures. Worse, the poet’s homosexual demons could not be tamed, and he ventured down to the crew quarters and made a drunken sexual advance on a male worker, who reacted by beating him up. Somewhere north of Havana the next morning, April 27, a passenger watched in horror as the poet, dressed only in pajamas and an overcoat, walked purposefully to the ship's stern, mounted the railing, slipped the coat from his shoulders and then jumped overboard to his death.

The son of a successful Ohio businessman who made a fortune in candy manufacturing, Hart Crane (1899-1932) dropped out of high school in 1917 and fled to New York City. Hart had suffered a difficult home life under the roof of his parents, who were always fighting. They divorced a year after Crane moved to NYC. For seven years he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, all the while writing poems that gained publication in literary journals. His menial jobs as a copywriter in NYC were interspersed with periods of working in his father's candy factories in Cleveland.

He lived a peripatetic life, moving in and out of apartments and rooms with friends in New York City; for a time he shared farmhouses with friends in southern Connecticut. His family owned a vacation home on the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba, where he wrote most of The Bridge, a collection of poems depicting New York City with a vibrancy that was rare in poetry. Unable to complete the book, he sought inspiration by traveling to Europe, and when he was awarded a Guggenheim in 1931, he settled in Mexico temporarily.

Although tormented by his attraction to men, his affair with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant marine, is reflected in  Crane was tortured by his love for men far worse than Walt Whitman decades before him. He did have one felicitous affair with a Danish merchant marine named Emil Opffer, who inspired his epic poem titled Voyages*, a highlight of his first book, White Buildings (1926). Opffer, whom he had met in 1924, lived in Brooklyn, but Crane also had an affair with the internationally famous Wagnerian tenor Lauritz Melchior, who was then singing at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan.

While Crane struggled to complete The Bridge (1930), in which the Brooklyn Bridge was the central object of the poem, he suffered tortured affairs and increasing alcoholism. The photo at left was taken when he was barely 30 years old, but alcohol had prematurely aged him. He did not cope well as a gay male in a culture that was largely homophobic. He realized that he was homosexual after an affair in Akron, Ohio, where he was employed at age 20 as a clerk in one of his father’s candy stores. His homosexual affairs were mostly anonymous, temporary, often violent, flings. Crane’s writing after 1926 was stymied by the conflict between his identity as a gay male and his identity as a poet. Numerous unpublished verses written between 1927 and 1931 reveal the struggle Crane undertook to invent a discourse that would honestly translate aspects of his homosexual experience into poetry.

Publication of The Bridge in 1930 brought Crane notoriety and fame, but he seemed unable to live up to his own standard after that. At the time of his death in 1932, much of his verse was dismissed as incoherent. It was not until 50 years later that his works were reassessed and became part of a contemporary curriculum taught in colleges and universities. The Bridge now appears in its entirety in the Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Thomas E. Yingling wrote Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text (1992), which saw that Crane’s authority rested on his position as an outsider, whose writings were not only expressions of his personal psychological division, but also eloquent records of cultural and social divisions.

*Voyages (1924) is a poetic sequence in praise of the transforming power of love. The work's metaphor is the sea, and its movement is from the lover's dedication to a human and changeable lover to a beloved beyond time and change. The sea represents love in all its shifting complexity from calm to storm, and love, in turn, serves as the salvation of us all:

Bind us in time, O Season clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

With its dazzling poeticism and mysteriously inspiring perspective, Voyages is often hailed as Crane's greatest achievement. R. W. B. Lewis called it Crane's lyrical masterpiece.