NY missive 194 - The House of Rust

The southwest corner of Central Park, early on a Friday morning

On the N train from 30th Ave, after a couple of stops I put my phone back in my bag and resist its tug and take out The House of Rust.

I had found it in the Strand bookstore, when we took the kids during their Winter break. I was by the “B” fiction row, which due to idiosyncrasies of shelving is tucked away in a corner, a bit removed from most of the fiction. I was looking for James Baldwin books. C and I had seen the “Baldwin in Istanbul 1961 - 1971” photo exhibit at Brooklyn Library for my birthday, so he was on my mind - also because the timeless clear anger and love that permeates his prose and is so needed at the moment. I was debating which of his books to buy when I saw a book by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber - The House of Rust - nearby, and chose it instead.

It was one of those moments that said “this is the book for you now”, with undercurrents perhaps being that it is set in Mombassa - I am somewhat obsessed by cities by the sea - and that the blurbs on the back made it clear it is something special, but more so being those mysterious ways in which books find their way into our lives in timely ways.

Anyway. I start reading on the train. It’s a part in the middle of the book when the main protagonist Aisha has ventured out to sea in a boat made of bones in search of her missing fisherman father. Along the way she has encountered and battled strange sea monsters, and just as my subway rattles in the tunnel between the Lex/59th and 5th Avenue stops the most significant of these encounters comes to a head in the most breathtaking, wild and beautiful way.

I’ve been battling my own demons these past months that seemed to come to a head yesterday. And here is this amazingly determined and resilient girl in her boat out in the ocean and my hands tighten on the pages and I smile with respect and relief.

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Once out of the train I walk up to JNH’s school for a monthly “coffee and donuts” gathering for parents. The theme of this one is teaching social studies “in these times”. JNH has followed his instincts for drama and film, and is now a drama studio freshman (almost at the end of the first year already!) at LaGuardia - a mighty change of scene from his small local middle school in Queens, but that’s a story for another day.

I walk up 6th Avenue to Central Park and cut through its bottom left (ok, southwest), corner. The weather’s a leaden gray which has an ominous tinge as I know this is the edge of a weather pattern that has ripped roofs off homes, and daycare centers, and megastores through the center of the country. 

I used to think tornadoes happen from time to time as grizzly one-offs, but no, this was a whole procession of them. Nature’s been getting more and more broken and mad at us, including here in the US where the year kicked off with rampant wildfires in Los Angeles. People get hit across the board but the building back is toughest for the poorest, and is physically done by the poorest, while insurance firms get wary of insuring anything that might dent their comfortable returns, and come up with creative mechanisms to avoid pay backs. 

For example, 2024 was the year with the third-biggest insured losses in over 40 years, the Economist reports. And yet “catastrophe bonds” that aim to protect issuers of insurance from major losses in natural disasters generated 20% and 18% in returns to their investors in 2023 and 2024 respectively, their strongest performance in recent decades. There are stringent criteria applied to when they have to pay out. When Hurricane Beryl caused devastation in Jamaica last year, a bond issued by the government and the World Bank did not pay out because the air pressure during the hurricane was conveniently just a touch higher than the level at which the bond would be paid out.

NY missive 193 - Here we are

Calling my pre-election post "fall" turns out to have been pretty apt. Either way that the result turned out would have been accompanied by a continued fraying: as it happens, the fraying has been accelerated.

There's now a sociopathic real estate guy back in the White House bringing his ruthless transactionalism to the global stage, with his most stakes-raising / obliterating move so far being to say that the US should take ownership of Gaza, whose people and their homes have been decimated with US support, and turn it into a "Riviera of the Middle East". Basically, an approach that involves ethnic cleansing to "clear" the way for luxury waterfront property development, into which his son-in-law's private equity firm - "Affinity Partners" - is salivating to invest. Proposals like these generate media and commentary which intentionally or not serve to legitimize them, making them a possibility through repetition and response, closing the space for alternatives, a banalization of horror. 

Meanwhile at his side stands the World's richest man who has brought in his "DOGE" team of young engineers to dismantle agencies. Greater efficiency and less bureaucracy and corruption would be great but that's not the intent here, instead it's deregulation, a convergence of land-grabs and tech-solutioneering that is accelerating capitalism's eat-itself, eat-us-all machine in darkly predictable ways. 

Within this crumbling World small interactions, smiles, gestures of kindness and humanity across boundaries small or big take on a new significance, they are a faintly beating heart that may suggest strength, or at least holding on, holding together, weaving a fabric of other possibilities that we have to be alert to, kindling them, gathering around them like fires providing warmth and light among ruins.

NY missive no 192 - Fall

 

Around this time last year I ran a session with the youth leadership group of one of NYC’s soccer teams, about the upcoming 2026 World Cup. Their coordinator kicked things off with an intro exercise, in which each person shared what the Fall brings to mind. When it came to his own turn he said that the leaves falling from the trees make him think not of deaths and endings, but of shedding, reminding him to shed any unwanted or unhelpful thoughts, and ways of thinking, and start afresh.

His comment has stayed with me. It came to mind today as I raked and swept the fallen leaves in the backyard. I scooped up mini piles (there will be more to come) of dry and crumbling leaves of many colors (with a soft feathery ball among them - D the cat is pretty adept at hunting). There was something melancholic but also comforting about it, particularly at this time with the next US election around the corner and its accompanying sense of chaos and disconnection - a reminder in flurries of crumbling leaves that that perennial cycles of decline and slumber and renewal extend so far behind and so far ahead of our short lives. 

These thoughts were swiftly followed by useless rage at oppressive governments, in the past, and right now, as violence wipes out thousands of lives and homes are destroyed, families, and the places where they too would have enjoyed the light from this same sun, enjoyed their own comforting rituals at different times of year.

NY missive no 192 - Steinway-Broadway walk and a "Nomenclature of Colors"

 

Screenshot from Pantone's
 introduction to its 2018 color of the year, "Ultra Violet"

One day this Summer CMH and I went to the Broadway post office in Astoria to mail a book to tía P. It was one of those spontaneous moments when it was just me and one of the boys (C and JNH were headed to the supermarket at the same time).

On the way, we passed the Hour Children thrift store on Steinway and resolved to check it out on our way back. CMH chatted about his process of writing an essay for school. Turning left along Broadway, we passed the library that has finally re-opened after a multi-year renovation - cue a brief reflection on why building projects take so long in this city - and passed another thrift store with books outside: that’s where a few years ago I’d come across a copy of architect's Daniel Libeskind's "Breaking Ground", just as I was beginning to obsess about all things "built environment". 

In the post office, the postal worker who helped us took an understandably long time typing in tía P’s address in the Swiss mountains. At another window was the postal worker who has been at that branch as long as I can remember, who keeps heroically calm during holiday rushes when the queue extends out the door.

On our way back, we went into Hour Children and tried out different sofas and chairs. 

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The book we were mailing to tía P was “Werners Nomenclature of Colors”. We had found it the previous weekend at the Cooper Hewitt design museum - the first time any of us had been (this has been an NYC Summer, and as we weren’t making it to visit P it seemed a perfect thing to send her, to have out on a table for guests at her mountain lodge to browse). Darwin used it to accurately describe colors of the places and creatures he came across while voyaging on the Beagle: blood red, leek green, snow white…

A lovely New Yorker article by Michelle Nijhuis gives more background on the book. The article includes insights from Tanya Kelley, a professor of languages at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, who says that the guide was one of many attempts in nineteenth century Europe to develop a standard way of describing colors: to bridge “word and world.” 

Now there are more mechanized systems to convey specific colors. (I remember being delighted when I discovered how simple it is to reproduce an exact shade with RGB or Hex codes). But Kelly argues that “language still matters, because it moves both the intellect and the emotions, often evoking qualities beyond hue”. 

For example, Homer described the Aegean Sea as “wine-dark” (oínopa). Scholars have come to think may have referred less to its color and more to the “movement of its water”, “shimmer of its surface” or to its depths. More recently Pantone’s 2018 color of the year was “18-3838 Ultra Violet”, which the company described as a “dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple shade” that evokes the “experimentation and non-conformity” of Prince, David Bowie, and Jimmy Hendrix.

I have to say, that the 2024 “color of the year” is much less inspiring: peach fuzz. 

NY missive no 191 - Layers of time in lower Manhattan

It took me a while to settle on what to read this Summer, when I realized I really wanted to read in French, and landed on La plus secrète mémoire des hommes by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. So that is what I was reading when I was on the N train with JNH last week to take him to his Summer camp (about which more later). At 14 (blimey!) he’s old enough now to take the trains himself - that’s what he’ll be doing when he starts high school in the fall - but when we can we’re accompanying him on the back-and-forths to Canal Street because why not, it’s company. 

I described a little segment of the book to JNH - a dark snippet from the book-within-the-book "Le Labyrinthe de l’Inhumain", which the main book's narrator Diégane is on a quest to find out more about. The guy sitting opposite us asked whether the book was in French, which led to a brief conversation-in-passing before he got out at the next stop, Queensboro Plaza. He’s Algerian, has spent time living in Paris (where the first part of La plus secrète…is set), and is now studying medicine here in NYC. I shared that I was reading the book to reignite the French that I’d learned at university. 

From Queensboro Plaza, the N goes down underground and under the East River into Manhattan. A few stops on, we passed through the 49th Street station which I can always sense we’re entering without looking up because of the bright red bricks of its walls, which emanate their red into the train. That’s the stop where I would get out when taking the kids swimming as babies at the pool on the top floor of the Skyline hotel. Like C, many parts of the city produce multi-layered memories for me, though still not as much as for him, who rode its trains and walked its streets as a child. Then we passed 28th Street, with its wonderful mosaics of hats, set at the height of their wearers and with a tile beneath saying who the wearers were. 

Our destination was Canal Street, where we got out and walked a couple of blocks to DCTV (Downtown Community Television Center), in a converted fire station round the corner on Lafayette. JNH is doing the so-far amazing DCTV Summer Media Intensive, in which NYC high schoolers create short documentary and narrative films. DCTV itself, set up in 1972 by husband and wife team Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno, produces many documentaries. 

Among the DCTV documentaries is the 50 minute “Canal Street - First Stop in America” by Tsuno and Peter Kwong which immerses viewers in the street and its people in the 1990s: street vendors, sellers of contraband fashion and fireworks, a couple of men sleeping rough, garment factory workers and the interactions between the informal law of the street and formal law enforcement. Another is Cuba and the Cameraman, featuring Alpert’s visits to Cuba speaking with the same three families over a period of 45 years. By coincidence we had all watched it last year, before JNH knew about DCTV and its programs.

The DCTV firehouse building stands at the the intersection of Chinatown, Tribeca, and the city’s downtown courts. The Bowery Mission serving homeless New Yorkers is across the street, and next door is a fancy gallery with its sculptures on display in tall windows. It was revenue from its documentaries that enabled DCTV to buy the firehouse building, having initially rented just the second floor - with real estate being as it is in NYC that’s a major factor in the non-profits longevity. 

I decided to take a long route home, walking down through Manhattan to get the ferry back up the East River to Astoria. Just below the courts I passed the African Burial Ground, which is one of NYC’s national monuments, together with the Statue of Liberty, Governors Island, and Castle Clinton. It is the earliest and largest African burial ground in the US, where free and enslaved Africans were buried between the 1630s and 1795. During excavation for a city building project in 1991 the remains of 419 men, women, and children were excavated, nearly of of whom were children under the age of 12, and who were only a fraction of the thousands thought to be buried there. 

Christopher Moore, a descendant of Goot Manuel who was one of the first 11 enslaved Africans in NYC, wrote a short essay on the historical context of the burial ground: from when the first known person of African descent arrived in Manhattan in 1613 from Santo Domingo - the free black sailor Jan (Juan) Rodrigues who traded with the Lenape - to the arrival of enslaved Africans as laborers for the Dutch West India Company, and into English rule when a mostly enslaved African labor force worked as “carpenters, blacksmiths, printers, sailors, dock loaders, tailors, seamstresses, bakers, and servants.” In 2003, the excavated ancestral remains were buried in the still-accessible part of the burial ground, together with nearly 8000 personal handwritten messages from the living.

I continued South, past City Hall (memories of leading a rally for electric school buses, and attending many others), and through City Hall Park (memories of C and I pausing on the benches there before heading down to the Seaman’s Church Institute - at that time on Water Street, now relocated to Broadway and replaced by an expensive daycare - to plan our wedding celebration). I paused for a while on a bench this time too. 

At the Southern entrance to the park, lying low in a circle of long grass, is a sculpture of a bison skeleton, called "Attrition" by Cannupa Hanska Luger.

I had intended to keep walking down Broadway but gravitated right, towards the 9/11 memorial site, and the accompanying shopping mall whose structure has echoes of the bison skeleton, converted into a church of consumerism. 

Tourists posed for photographs by the deep memorial pits with falling water that mark the bases of the two towers, with empty sky above. Overlooking the site, there is the newly renovated St Nicolas Greek orthodox church (I had bumped into the 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley in an Astoria cafe as he was reporting on that story), and a structured park dotted with introduced plants and homes for bees. The park connects with a walkway across the West Side Highway to an air conditioned Brookfield office tower where workers in fluorescent vests were cutting and installing bright green foam at the base of a new installation of plants.

A block West I emerged by the Hudson river and continued down to the Battery. I had pictured being in the park there, overlooking the harbor, but as often happens on city walks construction steered me off track: the Northern edge of the park is closed off by a long construction hoarding as restoration work goes on behind, so it being hot, my hopeless right knee playing up and time ticking on I curved off through lower Manhattan to get on the ferry home. The ferry departs from Pier 11 near the end of Wall Street, where a plaque in Manahatta Park recalls the sites use as a slave market from 1711 to 1762.

NY missive 190 - Cherry

 

One Spring break I was with the kids in London when C messaged with pictures showing that all of the trees next door had come down. These were the trees that had “waved their branches” to JNH during the pandemic, and cast dancing shadows on the back wall of our house in the mornings as the sun came up. They were the trees in G’s back yard, that were older than any others along the block - thick trunked and sprawling branched - a heaven for birds and brave cats, a compact 15-10 meter forest in the city. G’s wife had died, and not very long after, G moved to an apartment by the sea in Brooklyn with his daughter. New G (no relation, same first name) moved in with his wife and soon-to-be-born daughter, with big plans for transforming the place.

The house went through an epic and stressful renovation, and down came the trees - every branch, twig, leaf removed - to be replaced by a…swimming pool! There were scenes that August of workers digging its pit by hand and carrying buckets of earth through the house to a dumpster outside. There were quite a few pauses as the city shut down the project - and the pit would be covered up - before somehow it would get going again.

Then there was the trench for a new wall between our yard and theirs. I’d said please take care of the roots of the cherry tree on our side, which stretched across that divide. The tree was planted by H who lived here before, and was now the tallest around. Assurances notwithstanding, one day I heard its roots being hacked through with a saw - no fault of the guy doing it, who just had his job to do - and I flew outside like a crazy person, yelling please, don’t cut those roots. But of course you can’t have roots running right through a wall foundation.

The tree is still standing. The remaining arc of two thirds of its roots must be tough enough to support it. And it’s not only standing, but thriving, probably because of all the extra light that it has. Now there is a yard with a pool - and the daughter, who arrived mid-construction, splashing around in it - a wall, and then a cherry tree. The tree is sprouting more cherries than it ever has, and its reaching its branches high, as if growing into the spaces left behind by the trees that were removed.

NY missive no 189: Whale rocks

 

Yesterday I went on a birthday walk in Central Park, in the Northern part where there are fewer people. It was snowing too, which made it even quieter. As so often on entering the quiet parts of the park, my mind immediately began to breathe and react differently to when I’m out on the streets. The feeling wasn’t quite as overwhelming as when, a couple of Summers ago on a visit to tia D, we went up to the hills in Jarabacoa, where the greenness of the green and the size of the trees seemed to expand my synapses in ways I hadn’t experienced before But in Central Park, in the snow, there was still a perceptible shift. 

The fact that the Conservatory Garden is closed for renovation re-directed my walk in a different direction to how I had imagined it, in a good way. Close by the entrance I came across one of the millions-of-years-old Manhattan schist rocks. There was the permanence of the rock, and the temporariness of the snow.  

While a striking example, it prompted me to think that in any place and supposed moment in time, we experience a layering of temporality, some combination of the fleeting and the, if not permanent because nothing is, the much more permanent. A mix of things operating on narrow and wider timescales, which in turn makes time itself seem blurry, like the snow.

I walked on, making a loop through the North Woods and back to where I started, passing other rocks along the way. Some of them have the appearance of surfacing whales.