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.

New York missive no 26

When K and H were looking for a place for the three of us to live in Camberwell I gave them various prerequisites, including wooden floors and yellow walls (they were tasked with finding a place while I was on holiday). I was only half joking. So when I discovered that 173 Elmington Road had wooden floors (at least, in the kitchen) and yellow walls, I was happy. 

 Now here I am at my new home, 211 W 109th Street, with wooden floors and yellow walls. A good omen. And there’s air conditioning! Luxury. Though I’m going to ration it to keep the bills down. Have just done a slightly lazy job of putting some wooden shelves into their frame, screwing in just one bracket per shelf on each side. Touch wood they’re holding up. 

So this morning was farewell to Weehawken Street. I packed quickly, in a slightly sleepy and hungover fuzz. Post-packing J and I sat on the roof watching a storm rolling in over the Hudson. Heavy black clouds, lightening and grumbling thunder announced a much-needed downpour. When it subsided we ambled out through the West Village streets in search of Eggs Benedict (not a difficult quest), passing a cast of Saturday morning characters. There was someone J saw but I didn’t hence I’m not sure they were male or female, sneaking out of an apartment where they hadn’t expected to spend the night and clad in someone else’s pyjamas; a woman in very short shorts and a sleeveless top (on the way to a sexy yoga class? About to go for a jog? Just posing?); an old bearded man on a tiny foot-push shooter he kept stumbling off. Mission was accomplished at Extra Virgin – not just the Eggs Benedict but Bloody Marys, black coffee and orange juice too. We inspected vintage sports cars at the Cooper Classics show-room on Perry Street on the way back and, yes, it wasn’t hard to be seduced by sleek lines of the open-top Merc, painted green, gleaming, and whispering “take me for a drive, you know you want to.” 

 Back at Weehawken Street people were soon added to the piles of suitcases and boxes with duvets stuffing out of them – the two young Colombians, Mau’s cousin and his girlfriend, who’ve descended for a few days, and Ch who was helping with the move. I’d booked a man with a van, recommended by S. He turned out to be more a boy with a van - K, a striking-despite-the-pimples southerner with long floppy dark hair and a rickety van brimming with the remnants of previous moves and parties. While we were loading the van he was quiet and surly. But as soon as we crammed in he revved up, wound down the window, lit a roly and it was like something had plugged him in - off he went describing how much he adores his other work as a sound guy at National Undergound - the bar on Houston with Allen where I’d seem M’s boyfriend playing a while back. And how he’s not doing that much driving now because, “Like I know the city inside out and it’s nothing new any more.” And how last time he and a friend had done a driving job, they unloaded the full van into the wrong storage unit, having to return the next day and shift everything into another one two units along.

 

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It’s been an apartment-themed week. Thursday night was last Writers Studio’s class for this season. Went out for a meal afterwards when JH filled in a few more details about his apartment – a sprawling place with high ceilings, huge round windows and lots of plants in it on the corner of Bleeker and Broadway. He’s lived there since 1975 and hopes to be there for a long time having finally won a court battle with the landlord. In late 70s when he had double the number of rooms, a guru and his 12 followers lived in half the apartment. He’s still in touch with the guru, who has now retired on the basis that guru-ing wore him out (no doubt there was more to it than that – including the fact that gurus of that kind are less in demand these days). 

 Then on Friday found myself in a massive Tribeca loft, apparently underneath one owned by a Beastie Boy. Actually it’s not officially Tribeca, nor West Village, as it’s in an un-defined pocket South of Houston but North of Canal, sometimes referred to as “West SoHo” for want of a better name and which no doubt will be christened with a new acronym by real estate agents before long. NoTriBeCa?. SoWeVi? Unlikely, as both too-defined by the more glamorous neighbours to the South and North. The couple who live there, friends of R’s, had recently bought the next door loft as well – their Friday dinner party was to celebrate the descent of the wall between the two, traces of which you could see running through the middle of the room. The woman proudly showed us the view from the fire escape. I didn’t mention that their outlook over the UPS loading bay roof and with a gap through some buildings that gave them half a view’s-worth of river wasn’t a patch on the Weehawken Street roof panorama. 

So things that I’ll miss (or not miss, depending on mood) about West Village. Sights such the man and his dog queuing for coffee outside the orange “Mud” truck on the corner of 7th and Christopher the other morning: the man wore an open-necked expensive shirt revealing a semi-hairy chest; the dog had a Louis Vuitton handbag round its neck and protectively rested his front paws on it. The black transvestites hanging out on the Christopher Street corners. Yes, despite the recent rather sinister “clean up our neighbourhood” campaign in the Villager I like them, they’re part of what makes West Village what it is. Drinking coffee, eating overpriced (but delicious) yoghurt and berries and granola in Mojo at breakfast time, while reading the paper, watching the procession of well-groomed dogs and well-groomed mothers with their babies and getting into conversations with local divorcees. Whisky-drinking in the White Horse (though more of a Winter thing). The new pier at the end of Christopher that’s a surrogate garden for all and sundry in Summer-time. The higgledy piggledy streets lined with beautiful buildings to dream about owning.

 

But the new ‘hood's got plenty going for it too, like salsa-rhythmic barbeques on the pavements, wide roads, lots of trees and a big sky, food of all nations within a 10 block radius, booky vibes from Columbia and the buzz of not-yet-totally-gentrified Harlem just up the road.

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Café Tacci’s changed venue – ostensibly while the Waverley Place location's renovated, though according to the word from the regulars the shift’s for a dangerously undefined period of time. A bunch of us went last Friday. Thankfully the atmosphere’s still the same, even though the new place - Papillon on E. 54th - “is French”, Leopoldo the Italian matire-d confessed to me with more than a trace of shame.