NY missive no 180 - Unisphere and a city coming back to life

 

Unisphere, May 2021

On Wednesday evenings, JNH’s soccer practice is in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. While he plays, I walk up to the Unisphere. The first time, trees nearby were covered with pink and white blossom which floated down in the wind as people beneath the trees took photos, played, embraced, or sat depending on their age and as so often these days I was struck by the immeasurable value of public spaces with nature – breathing space for bodies and minds, collectively and individually (don’t get me started on the fact that there are growing efforts to put a price tag on nature, co-opting what’s left of the planet as a profit machine ostensibly to save it).

This Wednesday, the blossom was no longer there, but a new spectacle had arrived. Misty fountains of water came up from the ground all along the walkway leading up to the Unisphere, capturing sunlight. The photo illustrates it better than words can. The name “Unisphere” feels more resonant than ever. 

The kids’ soccer practices and matches have taken us all over the city this season. There's been a long subway ride on the N train out to Coney Island, where CMH was thrilled by the sight of the recently re-opened Cyclone and resolved to come back to ride it with C (JNH and I decided we'll do the Aquarium instead). Getting on to the homewards train (after a loss – there have been many) I looked back to glimpse the rollercoaster’s red lettering “CYCLONE” against the night sky. 

There have been taxi rides over the Triborough Bridge to Randall’s Island, invariably looping around and around a few times in search of the right field. The island has over sixty of them, but clustered within small groups for the 10s, 20s, 30s and so on, their assigned numbers go up to 91 which seems even more overwhelming. There have been pier pitches – fancy Pier 5 in Brooklyn Heights looking across to the Financial District, with signs around its edge saying that you’re welcome to fish, but that pregnant women, women of childbearing age and children under 15 shouldn’t eat fish or eels from the East River's waters, and Pier 40 by the Hudson, the athletic field looking less snazzy than it would have done back when it opened in the late '90s.

Back here in Queens, we frequently take the Q18 winding bus to Frank Principe Park in Maspeth. The square of playgrounds and sports fields is edged by Queens-defining elements: a cemetery (Mount Zion)…a gas station (Exxon, handily with a Dunkin’ Donuts outlet inside)…an auto repair shop…a roaring highway (the Queens Midtown Expressway section of the I-495)…suburban-style houses…and a hazy Manhattan skyline in the distance. 

The soccer has taken us to other places too, from Astoria Park to Manhattan Beach, from Long Island City to Sheepshead Bay. Throughout New York there’s an atmosphere of reunification – people reuniting with their city and with each other in typical New York proximity - of relief and fragility, barely-buried trauma, and a heightened appreciation for small things.

Unisphere, April 2021

Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo - part 1 - Flushing: Surprise

This is the introduction and part 1 of my 7-part essay "Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo."

During the last month of my maternity leave with Conrad, we went on walks in the city. The rhythm of the walks was more or less up to me. I was free to choose where they started and which turns to take, what to stop to explore and what to let pass by. Conrad’s needs played a role too though. His feeds enforced pauses, and meant that I targeted parks and quiet benches more than I would otherwise.

These are accounts of the seven walks. Many of the words came to me as I walked. Footsteps became words, paths sentences. I jotted some of them down in a blue notepad. If I was walking at the same time as writing to keep Conrad asleep in his papoose or stroller, the writing would be a jolty scrawl across the page.

1. Flushing: Surprise

Our first walk is in Flushing, Queens. We get out of the 7 train at the 111th Street stop in Corona and walk a few blocks South to Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The park is on the site that F. Scott FitzGerald called the “Valley of Ashes” in The Great Gatsby. Once a salt marsh, riddled with rivers and periodically drenched by the tide, in the early 1900s it was a dumping ground for industrial waste, including mountains of ash from coal furnaces. In 1930, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses had the area cleaned up. He chose it as the location for the World’s Fairs in 1939/40 and in 1964/65.

Public buildings constructed for the second World’s Fair still dot the park today, among them Queens Zoo, Queens Theatre, and the New York Hall of Science. Despite efforts to civilize it though the park has not shaken off a monochrome undertone of windswept wilderness, both natural and manmade. Much of it is covered in patchy thin grass, over which Canada geese roam as low flying planes on their way to or from nearby La Guardia airport skim overhead. We skirt around the edge of the Hall of Science and the zoo’s birdhouse. Through black railings and dense foliage I glimpse a scarlet macaw preening.

Near Queens Museum of Art, I talk briefly with a group of young people gardening in a rectangular rose bed. It turns out that they do community service in the park every Wednesday. One asks where my accent is from. London, UK I tell him. He replies with “that’s awesome,” then “I have a friend from Birmingham.” It is not always Birmingham, but invariably people have a friend from the UK who they refer to. I have lived in New York for five years, so it takes me aback when people ask where my accent is from. There are plenty of New Yorkers who do not have a New York accent. Often I tag “but I live here now” onto my answer.

In front of us is the Unisphere. It is a 12 story-high steel globe that US Steel donated to the 1964/65 World’s Fair. It has come to be a symbol of Queens, appearing on maps of the borough and in the opening credits to coverage of the US Open tennis, which happens to be underway at the stadiums right next to the park. This is the first time I see it with its fountains working. Tall vertical jets of water form a circle around it. They shoot high, then low, then high again. Just in front of the Unisphere a woman in a red jacket is practicing tai-chi. She seems to be conducting the fountains; as she raises her arms they rise.

With a swoosh the fountains stop. Their roar, which I had not really noticed before as I was so struck by seeing them, falls silent. I listen to the sounds that emerge in their space. There are cicadas. Birds calling, one (perched on a dormant floodlight) with a shrill single cry. People talking on their cell phones. A lawn mower at work. The rumble of cars on the close but unseen Grand Central Parkway, which we had crossed on a narrow footbridge to enter the park, its traffic streaming oblivious beneath us. Robert Moses liked parks but he liked big roads better. A light crunch of passing bicycle wheels. Footsteps. A cough. Then cranking, as two men get to work fixing something on the fountains, which presumably is why they have been turned off.

I started the walk planning to see an exhibition on Caribbean art at Queens Museum. It turns out that the museum does not open until midday on Wednesdays, and it is only 10 o’clock. So instead, after a pause to feed Conrad on a bench, during which the flow of people headed towards the tennis tournament thickens, we cross through the park towards Flushing.

We emerge on College Point Boulevard a few blocks East of Flushing center. I need to pee. “Kane’s Diner” beckons from the other side of the road. I enter, intending just to use the bathroom, but when one of the waiters greets us with a smile and a “sit anywhere you like” I decide to stay for a late breakfast/early lunch. Despite his welcoming words there is just one booth free, which I take. Conrad lies on the pleather-cushioned bench beside me, studying for much of the time the bottles of sauces gathered at the end of our table. The plastic-backed menu is an overwhelmingly dense collage of photographs of the food, with pictures of prominent republican types who have dined there popping up in places between the eggs and pancakes (Trump and Giuliani among them).

What works about diner food is not its individual ingredients but the combination of them. It is the fact you do not just get an omelet, but an omelet with lots of stuff stuffed into it and potatoes and brown toast on the side and ketchup or brown sauce or both to go on top. And coffee refills, and the familiar diner decor and atmosphere that is echoed from diner to diner while each retains a stamp of uniqueness too.

Post mushroom-omelet we set off again along College Point Boulevard. Chinese and English-language signs jostle for attention. The street is dominated by tile, bath and kitchen cabinet shops with the occasional anomaly like “Hisun LED,” which has dense lines of colored LED lights flowing around its walls. We hit Flushing town center by “Bland Houses” housing project. I am thinking what an unfortunate name that is when we pass a small, bright plot of flowers by one of the entrances with a hand-painted sign stuck in the ground:

“The garden of life after death.”

We wander up Roosevelt Avenue to Main Street, Conrad asleep by this time. I slip through tempting entrances along the way: into Iris Tea and Bakery with its fruit panacottas; a boutiquey-shopping center connected to Flushing’s Sheraton hotel where the décor is dark and lulled by falling water features; St. George’s Episcopal church, where a helium balloon trapped around a helicopter-fan up near the roof spins on its blade. Then a food market on the corner of 41st Avenue and Main where the fish counter features a tank of fat Baramudi crammed so tight they hardly have room to move.

It is time for a rest and more milk for Conrad at Flushing library, before we get on the subway home. Queens Library has just been saved from its annually threatened city budget cut, following a passionate campaign to prevent it. Sunlight slants through tall windows onto people accessing books, computers (more than a quarter of Americans now use a library for internet access) and advice from each other. In the children’s library I hear a girl telling a woman, her mentor of sorts it seems, about how she feels younger than her friends. She likes books for small children. She is afraid of things that her classmates find fun, like rollercoasters.

Part two: "Central Park: Time"

Note: the minimal maps that accompany this essay follow the paths we took

Queens' literary scene may be small but it's growing

Brooklyn’s massive book festival is underway this weekend, which is just one aspect of its thriving literary scene. Hundreds of writers have made and still make Brooklyn their home. Meanwhile reams have been written about Manhattan and by its inhabitants. There’s plenty of material for the “literary map” of that borough. It begs the question, what about Queens? It barely features on the literary landscape. For now, that is.

Few well-known writers live in Queens, and few books are set here. The Wikipedia category for “Queens, New York City in fiction” has just five entries (Manhattan 35, Brooklyn 25). Of course that is by no means comprehensive, but it is indicative. There are various potential reasons for this. Among them are history, aesthetics, the postal system (yes), a working class culture, and languages.

As Evan Hughes says in his 2011 book Literary Brooklyn, in that borough “the story of the place is legible and ‘a feeling for tradition persists’" (quoting Carson McCullers, writing about Brooklyn in the forties). He then quotes L.J. Davis who says that on many Brooklyn streets “the 19th-century city is surprisingly intact and, in parts, it is unusually handsome…Writers seldom live where it is ugly, if they have any choice in the matter.” Queens is not, on the surface of things, steeped in history nor beauty.

In 1830 it was still rural, with a population of under 10,000. By then Manhattan had become the largest city in the Western hemisphere and Brooklyn was a major city in its own right too. Queens' development stepped up as railroads arrived, factories opened, and it became identified as a destination for the juxtaposed purposes of urban recreation and burial grounds. However it was only after the consolidation of New York’s five boroughs into one city in 1898 and the arrival of the subway system soon after, that its development really took off.

In reality, Queens is hardly history-free. You just have to dig deeper and look harder to get it. Some of its roads still follow the routes of the trails used by Native Americans before the Dutch arrived. The 1657 “Flushing Remonstrance” that granted Quakers freedom to practice their faith is seen as an important precursor to the first amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights. The waves of immigration into the borough, and its workplaces ranging from factories, to power stations, to family-owned stores, contain no end of material for writers.

Then there’s appearance. Queens' landscape is, for the most part, one of haphazard functionality. An anthology of writing by Queens-based writers that came out in 2011 is tellingly called Forgotten Borough – Writers Come to Terms With Queens. Its Queens-born editor Nicole Steinberg says in her introduction, “It’s not the prettiest borough; upon first glance, not the most memorable.” Personally, give me a rail yard, an auto repair shop, a cemetery, an expressway, an Irish pub, a Buddhist temple or a Colombian bakery to write about any day over a sparkling skyscraper or sedate brownstone, though not all would agree. (Manhattan and Brooklyn, I know I’m generalizing here).

Queens is not “on the map” in people’s minds in a much more literal way too. The US Postal Service does not recognize it as a location. Addresses of places in Queens instead use the name of one of five main towns within the borough – Long Island City, Jamaica, Flushing, Far Rockaway and Floral Park, or sometimes the neighborhood name like Astoria or Jackson Heights. As Kenneth T. Jackson points out in his introduction to The Neighborhoods of Queens, this means that Queens is “not really a place in the usual American sense.” He adds that Queens’ sports teams do not reflect Queens in their name (the New York Mets for example), nor do the two major airports that are located there, John F. Kennedy International and La Guardia.

Another factor is Queens' working and middle class culture. Most of its inhabitants have been and still are people who work too hard to have time to write about their lives. That in itself makes the neighborhood story-rich. Invariably there is more to their stories, than the stories of people who think that their lives are interesting and have plenty of time in which to write about them.

And there are languages. One hundred and thirty-eight languages are spoken within Queens' boundaries. Fifty-six percent of its population speaks a language other than English at home. (More demographics via Queens in Context, here). That means, of course, that thinking about Queens writing has to mean thinking about writing in many languages. How wonderful it would be one day for a novel to be written using all of the languages spoken here. (Any suggestions for how to go about doing that are welcome!).

All that said, there are signs that Queens’ literary life is consolidating and growing. There are the writers featured in the anthology mentioned above, Forgotten Borough. Later this year a new literary journal, Newtown Literary, will launch – it will emphasize writing about Queens and by Queens based writers. (It also welcomes writing from elsewhere: as its website states, “Queens is just as much a state of mind as it is a geographic boundary”).

In Astoria, the closure of one much-loved bookstore, Seaburn Books on Broadway, was swiftly followed by the news of plans for a new independent bookstore, the Astoria Bookshop. Queens Library, thankfully just rescued from major potential budget cuts, is the largest in the US by circulation. The recent book Pax Ethnica - Where and How Diversity Succeeds credits it for playing an important role in making diversity work so well in the borough.

And Queens Council on the Arts has a program called QUILL, “Queens in Love with Literature.” It is a forum for Queens writers who are committed to translation, and offers people in Queens “the opportunity not only to hear from authors working in their own neighborhood, but also perhaps in their own language.”

Queens’ literary scene may be small but it’s growing. Hopefully it will remain uniquely Queens in character.

NY missive no 118 - A transparent plastic Buddha and a Flushing walk

There is a transparent plastic Buddha in the East River, floating just off the shore of Socrates Sculpture Park. It is called Floating Echo by Chang-Jin Lee, and is perhaps the most striking of many striking sculptures in the 2012 Emerging Artists Fellowship Exhibition. I had seen it yesterday from halfway across the river when I stood by the lighthouse on Governors Island. From that distance I wondered what it was. It appeared to be a strange shimmering buoy. This morning I saw it up close from the park. The Buddha’s head bobbed forward and back, gently, with the ripple of the water. As if she was laughing or bowing. The low morning sun flashed a vertical silver streak down her left hand side. It was echoed by the horizontal silver streak of the cars whizzing along FDR Drive in Manhattan on the far bank of the river.

(Written on 12 Sep)

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

I’m in the last month of my maternity leave with CMH. It can be divided up into four month-long chapters. The first three were: post-natal weeks when Mum was staying (the chaotic and humbling delight of being in the presence of a brand-new-born); then the four of us, as in C, JNH, CMH and I hanging out as a family in Astoria’s summer heat (many pizza slices and ice-creams, playground sprinklers, and JNH practicing riding his new scooter); then London (pints in pubs in Greenwich, new AirLine cable car over the Thames, witnessing a pig race etc). Now during this last month, I’m alone with CMH on the weekdays as C is back teaching at La Guardia and JNH is at his Montessori.

We’re having some blissful city strolls. Each day feels precious and complete. To an extent I’m free to determine their rhythm, choosing which paths to take. Yet CMH also has a say, in that when he wakes up from a sleep I’ll stop to feed him or liberate him for a while from stroller or papoose – we’ll pause to absorb the environment wherever that may be. And I seek out parks and other quiet shady spaces more than I would otherwise.

Last Thursday we went to Flushing. I could tell the story of my time in NYC through visits to Flushing but that’s for another time. We got out of the 7 train at the 111th Street stop in Corona and walked a few blocks East to Flushing Meadows Corona Park. We skirted around the edge of the New York Hall of Science and the birdhouse of Queens Zoo, where through black railings, the curved glass and white metal frame of their enclosure and some dense foliage I glimpsed a scarlet macaw, preening itself. We crossed the roaring Grand Central Parkway on a narrow pedestrian bridge and walked towards Queens Museum.

A group of young people were gardening in a rectangular rose bed. One, who looked latino, said hello to us, and then when I asked more specifics about their work he replied by asking where my accent was from. When I said London, England, he said the usual “that’s awesome” (I never know why), and “I have a friend from Birmingham” (it’s not always Birmingham, but most people have an English friend they refer to). I’ve been here almost exactly five years now. So it takes me aback when people ask where my accent’s from. There are plenty of New Yorkers who don’t have a New York accent. Now I tend to tag “but I live here now” on my answer. The volunteer said that he’s originally from Arizona, and that the group do service in the park every Wednesday, and with that CMH and I went on our way.

In front of us was the unisphere. It is an enormous steel globe that was donated by US Steel to the 1964 World Fair. It has come to be a symbol of Queens, appearing on maps of the borough and in the opening credits to coverage of the US Open tennis (which happened to be underway at the stadiums right next to the park). This was the first time I had seen the unisphere with its fountains working. Big vertical jets of water formed a circle around it, shifting in height from low to high and back again. A woman was doing tai-chi type exercises. She seemed to be conducting the fountains.

Suddenly with a swoosh the fountains stopped. Their roar, which I hadn’t really noticed before as I was so struck by seeing them, was silenced. I stood still and listened to the sounds that emerged in their space. There were cicadas. Birds calling, one (perched on a dormant floodlight) with a regular shrill single cry. People talking on their cell phones. A lawn mower at work. The hum of cars on the close but unseen expressway. A light crunch of passing bicycle wheels. Footsteps. A cough. Cranking, as two men got to work fixing something on the fountains, which presumably was why they had been turned off.

I was reminded of an article I had read recently on soundscapes, by Bernie Krause. They can be used to measure the health of a habitat. For example the effect of even minimal logging activity in an old growth forest can reduce a cacocphany of sound produced by a wide range of species to the much thinner sound of just a few. A soundscape, Krause said, has three basic sources: the geophony (non biological natural sounds, like wind or waves); the biophony (sounds of animals other than humans); and the anthrophony (man-made).

In this case, we were in a city and the sounds were predominantly anthropomorphic. But at least, I thought, there were many of them. And at least, in the form of the bird and the lawn-mower, there were signs of nature-other-than-man surviving, and of man making an effort to ensure that.

I had intended to go to Queens Museum to see an exhibition on Caribbean art. But it turned out that the museum doesn’t open till midday and it was only 10 o’clock. So instead, after a pause to feed CMH on a bench, during which the flow of people headed towards the tennis tournament thickened, we crossed through the park towards Flushing.

We emerged onto College Point Boulevard a few blocks South of Flushing center. (Another Boulevard, in all its pedestrian unfriendliness). By this time I needed to pee. “Kane’s Diner” beckoned from the other side of the road. I went in, intending just to use the bathroom, but when one of the waiters greeted us with a smile and a “sit anywhere you like” I decided to stay for a late breakfast/early lunch. In fact there was just one booth free, so I took it, and CMH lay on the pleather-cushioned bench beside me, studying for much of the time the bottles of sauces gathered at the end of our table. The plastic-backed menu was an overwelmigngly dense collage of photographs of the food, with pictures of prominent republicans who had dined there worked in (Trump and Guliani both featured).

At another recent diner-visit, to Court Diner in Long Island City, I’d been thinking that what works about diner food is by no means the individual ingredients, but the combination of them – the fact you don’t just get an omlette, but an omlette with loads of stuff stuffed into it and potatoes and brown toast on the side and ketchup or brown sauce or both to go on top. And coffee refills. And the familiar diner decor and atmosphere of course.

Off we went again along the Boulevard, which is dominated by tile, bath and kitchen cabinet shops with the occasional anomaly like “Hisun LED”. Its lobby, aflame with neon, looked like that of a hotel from outer space. We hit the town center by “Bland Houses” housing project. I was thinking what an unfortunate name that was, when it was contradicted by a small, bright gardening plot by one of the entrances with a hand-painted sign, “the garden of life after death.” We went up Roosevelt Avenue to Main street and wandered into a few places along the way: swish, tempting Iris Tea and Bakery; St George’s Episcopal church, in which a helium balloon had got trapped on one of the helicopter-fans right up near the roof to be spun around and around; a boutiquey-shopping center connected to Flushing’s Sheraton hotel; and a Chinese food market on the corner of 41st Avenue and Main where the seething fish counter featured a tank of fat Baramudi fish crammed so tight they hardly had room to move.

It was time for a rest and more milk for CMH at Flushing library. Queens Library has just been saved from a massive potential city budget cut, after a passionate campaign to prevent it. As some pointed out, the library system is one of the things that make hyperdiversity work so well in the borough. Then it was back on the 7 train to Queensboro’ Plaza and the N up home to Astoria, wrapping up a day of the city delivering unpredictable delights. Since then we’ve been on wanderings in Roosevelt Island, Chinatown and the LowerEast Side, and Coney Island (the latter along with C and JNH at a weekend)...hopefully more on those anon.

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.

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

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”.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 2 - 11, Weehawken Street

24 Nov

I’m sitting on the ridiculously comfortable purple velvet sofa in the Weehawken Street apartment. Murray, the plump ginger cat who was inherited from the previous occupants, is purring at me. I know what he wants. I’ve been feeding him this weekend as the others are away for thanksgiving so now whenever I get home he expects a can of turkey Friskies. He’s going to have to wait, at least an hour, and I’m going to have to resist his pleading. Apparently six months ago he was almost dead he was so fat. I’m worried the two cans per day I’ve been giving him are too much, so will be a bit stricter from now on and let him know who’s boss.

Oh-oh I’m talking pets and I’ve only been here a week.

This is a city of things coming up out of the ground. Film-famous steam spills out of manholes and spurts in columns from red-and-white striped tubes as the subway releases its heat into the cold Manhattan air. Heads emerge through pavement trapdoors from cellars, the underbellies of buildings that no doubt brim with things that don’t fit or shouldn’t be seen above ground. I’m amazed at how this island doesn’t sink under the weight of life it bears. Good thing it sits on granite.

Weehawken Street has its pavement trapdoors too, but most of the flotsam and jetsam is on full display at street level. It may be the shortest street in Manhattan but what it lacks in length it makes up for with character. It’s one of the last bastions against the Duane-Reed-Starbuckisation of the city. It’s now part of the Weehawken Street Historic District, hence protected from the glassy sky-reaching new apartment blocks that encroach to the north of it (the kind that are marketed as “artists lofts” when no artist could possibly afford them). The sea-faring industrial ruggedness of the Weehawken Street buildings still seeps through from behind the graffiti, the corrugated iron door-fronts, the “do not urinate or litter” sign that’s carved in stone on one of the walls.

At the Southern, Christopher Street end is the “Dugout” gay bar, with its bright orange beer banners hung outside, open till 4am seven days a week. At the other is a tiny art gallery that I haven’t yet explored, where, apparently, you can do things like poke your hand through a window to get it hennaed. And in the middle, on the East side, is our building, no. 9-11. Can I lay claim to it in that way having only been here a week? The historic district “designation report” describes it as a 3-story, neo-Romanesque style stables building with upper-story residence (i.e. the apartment I’m in now, along with purple sofa and ginger cat). It’s made of dark red bricks. It was clearly once elegantly functional and is now lopsided and fallen into disrepair. It was used as a stables till 1922, and since then has been “Lynch’s Garage”, “Weehawken Garage”, “Ray Electric Co”, Meier & Oelhaf marine repair, then GLC Productions – a music production studio. Apparently the fluorescent green walls of the stairwell decorated with enormous purple dinosaurs are a legacy of GLC, who left a few years ago. All the floors apart from ours are now empty, but ours is busy and colourful enough to make up for the quiet downstairs.

Time to give Murray his Friskies.

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

Went on an Annabel exploration today, taking the L-train out over Queens to the end of the line at Flushing, where I emerged into a forest of Chinese-language signs. I followed my nose down a wide road of supermarket warehouses and gas stations to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, a former dump described by Scott Fitzgerald as a “valley of ashes” and now the largest park in Queens. It’s a cross between the football-pitch part of Hackney marshes – open and windswept – and Regents Park, with its wide tree-lined paths and its Canada geese shedding feathers and droppings beside man-made ponds. Actually that doesn't do it justice, there's a lot of beauty there too.

The sun stays low at the moment, even in early afternoon. When planes flew over head on their way to La Guardia airport I’d look up only to be dazzled; there’d be just brightness and the loud roar of the engine.

At one end of the park is the Queens Museum of Art, with its huge architectural scale model of New York city that gives people a birds-eye view of the metropolis and that helped me get my bearings. Two of the artists currently exhibited there fired my imagination. Tahera Seher Shah, originally from Karachi and now living in the US after periods in Belgium and the UK, whose “Jihad Pop Progression” pictures are crazy constructions of pencil lines that combine Islamic symbols with architectural drawing to expose souls' struggles in an urban environment. Or something like that. And Yue Minjun from China, currently living in Beijing. He's labeled a pioneer of the “cynical realist” school but I doubt he likes labels. He paints wonderful bright pink Chinese faces with hundreds of evenly-sized teeth that stretch their mouths into eerily ecstatic grins. In one series the faces are clad in professional hats, a soldier, a fireman, a naval officer etc, in another painting they clamber over the Statue of Liberty, another they are striking martial-arts poses, another they are lined up like the terracotta army. A dramatic dismantling of authority and political symbolism, that also questions what follows.

From the art museum, I went on what was a much longer than intended – my fault for being map-less and underestimating distances – meander through Queens suburbs (past a temple with the sign "Ashram Inc", but not much else of note), till “boom” I hit Roosevelt Boulevard in Jackson heights, the heart of Americanised Colombia / or Colombianised America. La hora del almuerzo. Spoilt for choice of restaurants I went into one creatively called “El mesón Colombiano” and had a bandeja paisa; practically half a cow and half a pig on a plate (in the form of steak, sausage and chicharones), along with rice, beans, eggs, avocado and plantain. And an arepa. Despite the long walk back down to Manhattan afterwards, I’m still digesting.

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

A changing-room conversation I overheard in the gym, between two women in their forties (maybe fifties? Women work hard to look young here):

“Oh” (as if she’d meant to ask earlier), “how’s your sister doing?”

“She’s doing fine. She had her first chemo the other day. It wasn’t pleasant, but wasn’t too bad. This stuff happens. We’ve got her a nice wig, for when her hair falls out. She’s had her hair cut short already, so it doesn’t come as such a shock.”

“My friend’s hair didn’t fall out till right after the last session. Then wompf, it all came out in one day. She was going round the house with a vacuum to pick it all up. You know, it’s just not genetic any more, is it? Everyone’s getting it."

It sounded a bit like she was talking about a fashion accessory.

"How about the place that’s treating her?”

“Yes, it’s a good one, out of town.”

“Because you want to feel like, well, pampered. Not quite like being in a spa, but…comfortable.”

They finished drying, dressing and make-up applying, said their goodbyes and headed out to work.

Then in the café where I worked that morning (due to a temperamental internet connection at HRF) – ok yes, it was a Starbucks – the guy sitting next to me took three pills of different colours and sizes from his bag, laid them out on the table and swallowed them along with his coffee and muffin.

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

Tom Wolfe may have tried burning the vanities in Bonfire, but they survived. The flames just make them stronger.

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

25 Nov

There are clear signs on the streets of New York that the social safety net has big holes. On every block and in every subway train there’s someone who’s slipped through, pushing their home in a shopping trolley, searching through bins or rattling a McDonald’s cup containing just a few coins, holding out hope for more. Most turn a blind eye but some step in to fill the gaps. Like the Colombian Jorge Muñoz, profiled in yesterday’s New York Times. Alongside his job as a school bus driver, he cooks mountains of food everyday to take at 9.30pm to the day labourers sheltering under the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 73rd Street in Jackson Heights. Some of them will be back from work, others will have been waiting there all day for a job, without luck. Jorge gets his food from sporadic donations by local shops and from friends who work in the Long Island food industry, who told him one day of how much is thrown away, prompting his idea for the night-time kitchen.

Speaking of food donations, saw V for lunch in Brooklyn today - the Park Slope area inhabited by lots of young professionals, some with pushchairs. When she arrived in NY she worked for a while in the Cup Cake Cafe till her costume-designing jobs built up: at the end of each day piles of cup cakes would be left behind, which they distributed to people sleeping on the streets nearby. According to V the cakes there far surpass Magnolia's (of Sex and the City fame) - the long winding queues of people outside Magnolia are misguided...Having not tried either I've yet to pass judgement. V's found time here, along with cake-selling, costume-making, fashion-showing, gig-going etc., to learn to trapeeze.

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

For thanksgiving on Thursday I, along with hundreds of others, got the Southeast line from Grand Central out of the city, passing an explosion of Autumn trees. I spent the day at cousin K and V’s house in White Plains, where along with two of their daughters and a gaggle of grandchildren we feasted on turkey and all its trappings, chatted and played games. It was a relief to be in the still of the countryside. But I still got a rush when I arrived back in the city that night.