NY missive no 111 – Socrates Sculpture Park, the East River and time

Tucked between a Costco and a rusty-gated warehouse guarded by barking dogs on the far Western Side of Astoria, bordering the East River, is Socrates Sculpture Park. Sometimes the grass is wearing a bit thin. There’s often a feeling that things are in flux, as the rotating exhibit of sculptures changes. On one visit you might find a captivating cement tree embedded with rescued ceramics (an owl here, a cat there, a fish, a human face, pastel flowers), the next a dirty mound marking the spot where it stood, and the next, grass over that mound making it a perfect perch for picnickers and sprawled sunbathers.

The feeling of things in flux is part of the park’s magic though. That, and the contrasting presence of the river, which despite its restless flow and fluctuating light speaks of permanence. It’s the same river after all that was navigated by the Rockaway Indians in their canoes, and the same river where they ominously reported sighting “white winged canoes” in the late 1400s and early 1500s when on various occasions the British and Dutch eventual settlers made their first sail-bys in search of a northwesterly route to the East.

It’s the same river where the Hussar frigate sank, supposedly containing a chest full of coins that was never recovered. It’s the same river where on June 15, 1904 the General Slocum excursion boat caught fire. Over a thousand passengers died, mainly women and children, who were on an outing from St Mark’s Lutheran Church on the Lower East Side – it was New York City’s worst disaster before the 9/11 attacks. It’s the same river where there are new efforts afoot to encourage recreational canoeing, and where the East River ferry recently re-launched, making quick hops downstream: 34th Street in Manhattan - Long Island City - Williamsburg - DUMBO - Wall Street - Governors’ Island and back again.

One of the current exhibits in the Sculpture Park reflects the area’s past and present and casts an eye to the future. Thin red and white striped vertical poles mark a route from one of the park’s entrances on Vernon Boulevard, to the river. Their colors echo the red and white striped chimneys of "Big Alice" power station a little downstream, while the path they follow marks that taken by Sunswick Creek. The creek used to wind its way from what is now 37th Avenue and 21st Street to its East River mouth. As an 1896 history of Long Island City describes, when the East River first formed after Long Island Sound burst opened up to the sea, the river's “Western shore became scenes of salt marshes, lagoons and creeks…Beaver, deer and other fur and food producing animals roamed the forests, while the streams abounded with fish and other food products of the sea.”

Over time the creek became surrounded with agricultural land, then industry, and was then buried entirely by an illegal dumping ground which in 1986 artists, led by the sculptor Mark di Suvero, claimed to create the Socrates Sculpture Park. The exhibit also works inland to the former creek’s source, using red and white stripes painted onto lamposts. It is the artist Mary Miss’ contribution to a project called “Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City” in which the Sculpture Park and nearby Noguchi Museum are exploring ideas for what this waterfront area could become.

Artists who take up in previously derelict areas are often gentrification canaries. A pattern kicks in, in which before long they help make an area desirable, which pushes prices up and them out. Socrates Sculpture Park looks stunning at the moment. It’s a hive of activity and excitement. Yet I can’t help being wary of a future High-Line effect (while hopeful it can be avoided). Recently, walking down the High Line on the Western edge of Manhattan, a disused elevated railway line that has been converted into a long thin park, I was struck by how corporatized it feels.

The High Line is still fun to visit, with its quirky-angled views Chelsea buildings and streets and the occasional glimpse of a fragment of the Hudson, but new luxury apartment buildings already loom over it and are beginning to dominate. Most are still freshly-clad in billboards advertising their location “on”, “by” or “over the High Line”. The songs of birds pecking at feed-boxes on an exhibit designed to attract them are drowned out not only by tourists’ cameras photographing them but more loudly by the banging and clanging of adjacent construction sites. Squished between the new buildings are stifled attempts by arty types to say “hey don’t forget us”: a naked mannequin posing in a window here, some space-claiming graffiti there.

In an earlier post on a “Queens Kind of Cool” I hoped that Queens retains three defining traits as it evolves: diversity, entrepreneurialism and openness. The same goes for changes along Queens’ border with the East River. Hopefully the park and its surrounding areas will also keep elements of messy flux and marshiness. Hopefully they will always be a place where the river brings a whiff of the past and the land can render surprise.

This pic was taken back in April. When I went to the park the other day the grass was much thicker, the sun shining, and the Sunswick Creek exhibit complete - here it's still in the making.

New York missive no 59 - Teddy Kennedy, leadership, Diane Wilson, dragon boats

On a Friday evening, after dark, C and I found ourselves overlooking East River straight at the abandoned smallpox hospital on Roosevelt island. It looked back at us with its black, hollow eyes set in a ghostly rectangular face of pale bricks.

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In death, compassion is recognized as heroic. If only that was the case in life.

The press and commentaries on Teddy Kennedy’s death were quick to praise his championing of the underdog. They described the ways in which he steadfastly supported workers, the uninsured, the sick, the immigrant, and how he saw his privilege as a responsibility to help others.

The one time I ever saw him in person was at a congressional hearing held by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, about the working conditions of Florida’s mainly-immigrant tomato-pickers.

Yet I cannot help feeling that in life those qualities of compassion and a steadfast commitment to justice are not given the credit they deserve. Despite the shift in tone here in the US that has followed Obama’s election (currently soured anyway by divisive, smeary debates on health care reform), they are sidelined as idealistic, rather than recognized as the qualities of leadership that can bring about real “progress”.

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A few years back, JN walked into the office and asked, in her enthusiastic school-teachery way, “Can you name an inspiring global leader? One who’s alive today?” Ummmm…there was an awkward pause. "Mandela?" ventured some. And that was about it.

Now, many would say Obama as well. A global leader in the sense that (among other things), he can navigate the complexities of globalization, resist seeing things in black and white however much pressure there is to do so, while at the same time never losing a sense of direction. He keeps sight of the bigger picture that underlies every decision, one that has fairness at its core. I was surprised that Michael Moore, in a recent Rolling Stone interview about Obama’s first six months, was still overwhelmingly supportive – his theory being that any perceived over-compromises he has made are part of a broader strategy to keep things moving in the right direction.

But more than ever, leadership is as much about pushing up from the bottom as it is inspiring from the top. I recently read "An Unreasonable Woman" the autobiography of Diane Wilson about her persistent, painstaking campaign to combat pollution by Formosa’s plastic factory and other industrial projects by Seadrift in Texas, where she had worked for years as a shrimper. She new nothing, at first, about environmental campaign strategies, litigation, the regulation of toxic pollutants and the dirty tactics business would employ to evade that regulation. But that didn’t matter. She did know that the damage being done to her bay, her sea – in her eyes a physical creature who "still talks even though she's got a mercury Superfund on her left breast and vinyl chloride and phthalates on her right breast” – was wrong. She knew that however many people called her crazy, she wasn’t going to rest until she stopped it.

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Apparently in the UK – and I guess elsewhere as well – companies perceive criticism printed in a newspaper as more libelous than criticism that only appears on the internet, even though defamation laws apply equally to both. Something about the fact of printing and producing a paper gives the impression the words have more weight, are harder to remove and can do more damage. That’s a little illogical. Words online can reach a far wider audience than printed words, and they have a tendency to self-propagate, appearing on two, four, twenty, a hundred different websites and blogs making them all but impossible to erase.

That attitude implies electronic words have less ‘value’ than printed words. So what does that mean for the shift from printed books to e-books – for the rise of Kindle? Of course, the phasing out of printed books is inevitable, though I’ll lamenting along with others the loss of the smell of pages, of pen-scribbles in margins, of sagging bookshelves. But will words really mean less when they appear on screens from which they can come and go, be uploaded and downloaded? Burning books is seen as sacrilege. Wiping an electronic book off your hard drive isn’t.

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Kykuit, the Rockfellers' estate up the Hudson River at Sleepy Hollow is staggeringly beautiful. It inspires conflicting emotions of delight, envy and queasiness at the sight of so much wealth concentrated in one family. Wealth built on the back of Standard Oil –via large-scale exploitation, or wealth-generation for others, or both, whichever way you want to look at it.

“Money can buy you anything” is epitomized there. You like Picasso? Then commission a series of gigantic tapestries of his paintings to hang in your basement art gallery. How about the sculptors Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, David Smith? Fill your landscaped gardens with their work. And want to protect the view of rolling forested hills from your living room window? Get the government to designate it a national park (and thank god they did otherwise that stretch of the Hudson would no doubt by now be smothered in identikit condo blocks).

C and I went up there by train a few weekends ago. The train tracks run alongside the river, which inspired me to get kayaking (one day!). And despite the crazy opulence of Kykuit itself our day was characterized by magical moments that money could never buy. We sat under a tree eating tomatoes and strong cheese on a hunk of bread (actually money did have to buy us that – from a pricey Tarrytown farmers’ market). We encountered two inquisitive deer when we set out on a walk down the Croton aqueduct. We snuck through back gardens when the aqueduct path disappeared on us. I got the giggles at something C said and spat the water I’d just sipped all over the place. From a river wall in Irvington we glimpsed the shadowy forms of the Manhattan skyline, way downstream. We felt sleepy and content on the train on the way home, me gazing at sunsetted scenery flicking past the window, C scribbling bits of a poem on yellow postit notes.

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Labour-day weekend involved jumping in and out of a swimming pool at a big house in the middle of nowhere in Rhode island with a bunch of C’s university friends.

One morning, while I was lying on my belly reading Frank Norris’ "Octopus - A California Story", a small rust-coloured butterfly settled just in front of my nose. It opened and closed its wings, like it was hesitantly applauding the day’s performance.

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We took a break from the dragon boat festival at Flushing in Queens to go and see the "Panorama of the City of New York", the scale architectural model of the city built by Robert Moses for the 1964 World's Fair. The one I’d seen on my Queens exploration very soon after I moved to the city, almost two years ago. How wonderful to walk around the map again and for it to feel so much more familiar, alive. It had sprouted memories.

I’m giving my love of the city an extra stoke by watching Ric Burn’s mammoth documentary series “New York” – in bits, taken out of an old-school DVD shop on Greenwich Avenue.

New York missive no 23 - Two rivers and Soho House

Three scenes: Brooklyn Bridge Park in Dumbo, Soho House and sailing on the Hudson.

A few weeks ago I went with a bunch of kids from Daniel Hale Williams School in DUMBO and other volunteers to dig up weeds and plant seedlings in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The new park’s much loved but attracts latte-sipping white parents and their kids from the swish new riverside apartments more than it does the predominantly black kids from local projects. The idea was to say hey, this park is your park too, and hopefully inspire the children to bring their parents back to see the fruits of their labour.

First, we listened to an introduction by one of the park wardens. She explained how the East River is part salt, part fresh water, as the sea gets sucked upstream on the incoming tide. A while ago some conservationists drew nets out over the river bed and pulled them up to the park to see what lives down there. They found a seahorse, among other things. “Does anyone know what a seahorse is?” she asked. On cue, one of the girls said, “Yes, I have one!”, and plucked a purple plastic seahorse from her pocket. No further explanation needed.

Then, the weeding. We were shown which plants to dig up, which ones to leave, and got to work with our trowels: much delight as the first weeds were unearthed, pulling up roots as long as the plant itself. I relished as much as the kids did that feeling of mucky hands, tugging at leaves and earth stuck beneath nails. Enthusiasm waned a bit by the time we got to planting and the kids' attention switched to new things like the pizza they’d been promised for afterwards, at Front Street Pizza round the corner: one was really restless and said she’d like to jump the park fence.

Post-pizza they had a new burst of energy. A reminder that a day for a young person (these kids were 7-9) is like a hundred days, changing and renewed by the hour. They chattered their way back to the school. One recounted how she’d once had a finger bitten – by a polar bear – on a trip to the arctic – and that Santa had given her a new one.

Soho House on a Tuesday night, an altogether different scene where mud beneath nails would definitely be frowned upon. It’s a member’s club and hotel for New York’s Notting Hill set, monied and media/artsy rather than banking/financial, confident on its corner overlooking the meatpacking district with its rooftop terrace swimming pool surrounded by loungers and dining tables. Much disgruntlement though that the Standard’s new hotel under construction to the West of it will steal much of the evening sun. I was much less blonde, much less skinny than the majority of the women there but happy as an observer. And laughed when I remembered the Sex in the City Scene in which Samantha sneaks in by pretending to be an Englishwoman called Annabel: I didn’t need to pretend to be either.

And yesterday, sailing in a Soling on the Hudson. Give me a boat with sails, some sun and wind and I’m happy. Three of us were having a “basic keelboat” lesson (thought I’d start at the beginning to get used to the boats) with the guy who runs the club, BR. He's a non-fiction literary agent who intersperses his teaching on points of sail and how to tie a bowline with historical and geographical anecdotes. How the Hudson used to be called North River, how old schooners couldn’t sail close to the wind, how Los Roques islands off Venezuela have been adopted by Italians and how the Chesapeake’s oysters have all been fished. For thirteen years he’s run the New York Community Sailing Association to provide affordable access to sailing: buying a bunch of 10 sailing sessions as I’ve done for after the course works out at $15 per session unlike other places where it’s more like $150. It’s an ongoing battle though to keep it going. No-one in NYC has a lot of time on their hands to help out maintaining the boats; people who start there go on to buy their own boats (yes, despite providing affordable sailing it’s hardly attracting underprivileged teenagers from the Bronx); the hard-core winter match racers go off cruising in exotic places during the Summer months. If I had a few extra days kicking around each week I’d love to help build it up: help secure the re-location to the Manhattan side of the river (the boats were moved to New Jersey post 9-11), approach foundations for funding for more boats, increase the membership etc. But that’s not the case. So for now I’ll enjoy the sailing and muck in as much as I can.