Thank you Conrad Manuel Hiraldo - Part 7 - DUMBO to Red Hook: Destination

This is the seventh and last part of my essay "Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo." Introduction and part one. Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six.

The Monday before I go back to work is a clear blue-skied day. The rest of the week is gray and wet, so this turns out to be the last of our September excursions together through the city. Conrad and I take the newly-reopened East River ferry from Long Island City to DUMBO. Another acronym; this one stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. It was once an area where sailors, prostitutes, street gangs and writers who thrive off such environments or financially have no choice but to live there crammed into late-night bars.

Now it is the scene of arty brunch venues and the expensive River Café. A restored carousel by the water’s edge transports exited children on painted horses as their parents watch them come around, trying to catch their passing smiles on camera. There is the clanking of Cat diggers and thud of trucks behind a placard promising “Pier 5 – Picnic Peninsula.”

We climb up to Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The stately townhouses look just as they did when they were built in the nineteenth century. It was at 110 Columbia Heights, backing onto the promenade, that Hart Crane worked on his poem The Bridge. He wrote a letter to his grandmother describing the neighborhood as a “magnificent place to live”, with its sweeping views of Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan’s new skyscrapers and the endless to-and-fro of boats. A world apart from the slums of the Lower East Side just the other side of the river.

“I dated her for a couple of years…she wrote this great memoir,” says a well-dressed man to his female companion as we pass them in nearby Cobble Hill. Lived Brooklyn is infused with literary Brooklyn. Along Court Street I browse briefly in the Court Bookshop, where flyers announce upcoming readings. I buy a ham and cheese sandwich at D’Amico, an Italian deli where hessian sacks of coffee beans line one wall, filling the air with their aroma. I stuff the sandwich into my bag for later and keep on walking South. I am thinking that Conrad might wake up soon, that I should find a place to feed him then hop on the subway home, but he keeps on sleeping and I keep on walking, and resolve to make it down to Red Hook. We navigate a noisy narrow overpass across the traffic of the Gowanus Expressway, named after the canal renowned for its fetid contents. Through Coffey Park, where groups of people huddle talking, down Van Brunt Street with its crop of new cafés, around past Sunny’s Bar that teeters in its isolation, and to the sea. Not long after this walk hurricane Sandy will rip through the area.

I find a bench in a small park overlooking the water. It is surrounded by plants, and while I am aware of two men on another bench further along the path from us it feels as if we are alone. Somewhere nearby, shrouds clang against masts. Seagulls cry, a factory hums. A huge cargo ship – Saudi Diriyah says the name on the side – is reversing towards the shore, towards us. Its loading ramp is raised at the back, a vast rectangle of metal slanting up towards the sky. The ship seems to come dangerously close. The water must be deep here, where the East River fills into the expanse of the sea. The ship stalls. Then it gradually pulls away and embarks on its course to its next destination, bearing its cargo and invisible crew.

Conrad wakes up. I have my sandwich, he has his milk. I respect him for waiting, as if he wanted us to reach this point for our stop.

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.

New York missive no 5 - DUMBO to Doris

Soon New York will be completely smothered by a patchwork of acronyms: the acronymed areas rapidly encroaching on those still with names. There’s TRIBECA (Triangle Below Canal), SOHO (South of Houston), NOLITA (North of Little Italy), DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), BELDEL (Below Delancey), now SOHA (South Harlem) – those last two, and probably many of the others too, the creations of real estate agents wanting to give a hip veneer to previously no-go areas and attract people who otherwise wouldn’t want to live there. The question, as always, is when those people move in, where do the previous inhabitants go?

On Monday night I was in DUMBO, with its warehouses now worth a lot, its tucked-away theatres and galleries and its fantastic views up to the towering Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, stretching their way over East River and yelling steely aspiration. One of the galleries I walked past had a whole carousel on display through its glass wall. It was spookily unlit and silent, its horses frozen mid-leap, with wild gazes and open mouths.

I was in DUMBO for an event at the International Center for Tolerance Education: an update on the “myth of the motherland” project that’s sending young US poets to African countries, so they can report back with poems that dismantle the myths of how Africa’s seen in the West. Other than a niggle that African poets are probably better-placed to do that, it was an inspiring event (that niggle was shared with a Sudanese woman I met there, who has spent a few months in New York on a fellowship at the ICTE. She’s been amazed by people’s urge to “do something” to help other countries and the way that the actions they take are based on a dangerously simplified knowledge of what those countries’ reality is: bottom-up action’s better than top-down was her message).

One of the poets was an honest, inspiring Palestinian American woman called TS (when’s a woman a woman not a girl – anyway, she’s 20). Along with her studies at Columbia she’s a youth worker and is getting her first book of poems published by Penguin next year. The poem she recited was about a gutted fish… “And I sew her, back up”…Right at the end of the poem the image of the gutted fish fuses with a victim of rape. TS is wary of her poems being captured in Penguin’s print, because she’s a slam artist and all of her work so far has involved standing up on a stage and improvising. The book’s going to be called Respect the Mike.

On a table at the entrance to the event there were scattered, books, leaflets and free CDs. Flicking through one of the books, a fat hardback called “Face of human rights”, I came across something Sergio Vieira de Mello said soon after he became UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: “We all know, after all, instinctively, when rights are being violated.” It’s important we remind ourselves of that powerful simplicity from time to time.

Well one minute I’m talking about dangerous over-simplification and the next, the power of simplicity. Within both though, is the need for reality and directness, and to prevent distance from distorting.

[J’s just got home excited with a new drum from Guinea: his old one had collapsed from overuse].

****************************************************

It’s got cold in New York all of a sudden, and people are walking around like penguins wrapped up in thick dark coats (I’m one of them). Not as cold as Chicago, according to A, whose also just got home, back from a work trip there. Christmas commercialism is working its way through the city too: the ersatz Christmas songs in the shops and bombardment of advertising is not good; the smell of pine from the stacks of Christmas trees lined up on street corners is.

****************************************************

Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech resonated with me, with its appeal to strengthen the direct, physical connection with literature that we get from books and from teachers, and its warning against the seductive virtual connection to the “inanities” of the internet. But I do wonder if she’s talking from experience about the internet; I can’t see her being an expert at Google searches, nor as having explored the way the internet can bring abuses straight to the attention of people who can do something to prevent them, exposing and provoking. And if travels on the New York subway are anything to go by, books are not as neglected as she implies. Every fourth or fifth person is clinging with one hand to a handle and with the other to a book that they’re engrossed in. And with a mysterious third hand to a plastic coffee cup.

Speaking of internet connections, my Verizon debacle is nearing a resolution, though I’m wary of speaking too soon. Another connection confusion made me laugh yesterday, when it transpired that the reason why my first foray into the New York dating scene wasn't going anywhere was a wrong digit in a phone number. So on my list of things to do today is to call the right number.