New York missive no 132 - Rainey Park and "The Father of the Bridge"

The Sunday after 4th July I took the boys to Rainey Park. Two things meant the Summer heat was delightful instead of oppressive. There was a breeze, and we were there in the late afternoon when the Sun was low in the sky. The breeze was intensified because the park is by East River.

A couple of weeks previously we’d been here in the morning to celebrate CMH’s second birthday with friends. Now, there were parties going on everywhere, this being 4th of July weekend. Groups of folding chairs were circled around portable barbeques that released the smell of lighter fluid and burgers into the wind. The parties merged into one another because the park is only small and the children created a constant stream weaving between them, across each other, over the play area with its soft tarmac hills and slides that were too hot to slide down, unless, that is, you tipped buckets of water down which made them thrillingly fast, too fast for the little ones.

Most of the people in the park were Latino, presumably because many of Astoria’s whites headed out of town over the holiday weekend. The whole neighborhood had had a dropped-shoulders feel from Friday 4th because of the reduced population and changed demographic.

CMH headed straight for the water fountains. For an hour he ran in and out of the jets, putting his foot on them at times to block them, or observing groups of older kids with their water games, sticking out his belly to assert his toddler-confidence. JNH gravitated to the other side of the play area, a slope of unkempt grass tilting down to the river. He chased dragonflies. Huge ones swung about in the air above him. At one point he asked for a pot or a net to catch them, but when that didn’t come through he just ran beneath them, waving his arms excitedly but clearly with no real intent to catch them.

I later learned that Rainey Park is named after Dr. Thomas Rainey, who had dreamed of building a bridge from that same place across what is now Roosevelt Island (then Blackwell Island), to Manhattan. A group of Long Island City-dwellers incorporated the “New York and Queens Country Bridge Company” in 1871. Rainey became its treasurer and traveled the country to raise funds. But the War Department was worried a bridge could weaken the defense of New York and access to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and didn’t approve it. Anyway, most of the interest was for a bridge project linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. By 1892 the project was on hold. But a community group called the Committee of Forty kept the idea alive. It gained momentum after the consolidation of the three boroughs into New York City in 1898, and finally the bridge was built a few blocks South of the original location. It was called Queensboro bridge.

Dr Rainey walked across the bridge on opening day in 1909, and received a gold medal with “The Father of the Bridge” inscribed on it. He said to the New York Times:

“This is my bridge. At least it is the child of my thought, of my long years of arduous toil and sacrifice. Just over there, are the old towers of my bridge, which I began to build many years ago. I spent all I owned on the project...It is a grand bridge, much greater than the one I had in mind. It will be in service to thousands in the years to come, when Dr. Rainey and his bridge projects will long have been gathered into the archives of the past.”

In 1912, after Rainey had died, the area which he had planned for the bridge was named after him and then turned into a park.

So there we were. In a park that commemorates a man’s dream for a bridge. The air contained children’s yet-to-be-formed dreams for their future, teenagers’ emerging dreams, adults’ abandoned, lingering or realized dreams, but just contained them. All were suspended on a Summer afternoon when attention was occupied in the present, with barbeques, water-jets or dragonflies.

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Two phrases I’ve been encountering recently with implications that outstretch their mundane context:

1. The way that yoga teachers describe crossing your arms in the direction that you’re not used to:

“A non-habitual interlace.”

2. And what New York subway drivers say to their passengers, after warning them to keep a close eye on their possessions (or to report instances of sexual harassment):

“Remain alert, and have a nice day.” (They give a big emphasis to aLERT - the ER sounding the same as in "jerk").

Which of course means "keep alert – oh, and have a nice day too". But it could be understood to mean that if you remain alert, you will have a nice day.

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 103 - Individuals & cities, psychogeography, an orange digger

Mural in El Barrio - corner of 104th Street and Lexington.

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A snippet of cellphone conversation overheard along Astoria’s 35th Ave: “So when he had the hat on they booed, and when he took the hat off they cheered? That doesn’t make sense, no?"

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As a child I entered a poetry contest that had a title something like “The Earth.” I submitted what I thought was an epic entry, “Ballooning the Earth”, about a hot air balloon travelling around the globe. I tried to put everything in that poem. The winner of the competition wrote about a single earthworm. That was a good lesson in the value of small details and component parts. The lesson also applies to writing about cities. It’s only through the stories of cities’ individual inhabitants that any sense can begin to be made of the whole.

With that idea churning around in my head, of course now I am encountering it all over the place. For example, I came across the concept of psychogeography, and intrigued, got a short overview of it by Merlin Coverley. (It’s aptly called “Psychogeography”.) Although formally claimed by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in 1950s/60s Paris, it’s an amorphous term and Coverley traces it both backwards and forwards from there: back to Daniel Defoe, Blake, and other London visionaries; forward to people like Ballard, Peter Ackroyd and Ian Sinclair. Recurrent elements are city street wandering (particularly à la dérive, with no particular direction or purpose), using that wandering to sense the effect of urban environments on the individual psyche, a consciousness of the city’s past as it manifests itself in the present, an openness to re-imagining the city, and challenging the status quo. At times I've felt myself wondering if such a broad concept needs a term at all. It seems a bit contrived to put a label on it, as if to try to rarefy and pigeon-hole into a "discipline" an experience that should be so accessible.

When Coverley gets to talk about Michel de Certeau’s "Walking the City" though, de Certeau’s ideas certainly resonated with me. Perhaps in particular because in that book he was writing about New York? De Certeau describes two roles within a city, the voyeur and the walker. In New York that division is accentuated by the height of the buildings, with the voyeur gazing down from the detached top of skyscrapers to the street-walker below. (Presumably he’s talking, as so much “New York” writing does, about Manhattan). The latter group experience the city as a conceptual whole, removed from individual perspective. The distinction between the two, De Certeau says, “emphasizes the democratic importance of the street-level perspective to be gained from walking the city and reconnecting with individual life...In the light of this distinction it is clear how the simple act of walking can take on a subversive hue, abolishing the distancing and voyeuristic perspective of those who view the city from above.” The history of the city is written from the individual perspective at ground level rather than the generalizing perspective up above, he says.

An 1896 “History of Long Island City, New York” (which used to encompass Astoria and by some definitions still does) by JS Kelsey also makes this point. Written soon before the five separate boroughs merged to form New York, it aimed to preserve details about Long Island City for posterity: the full book is online here. Its preface begins: “The history of a city originates in individuals. In its frontier days stands a household or two as lone prophets of better eras. In the lives of men therefore lie the records of society, whether it is developed into a municipality, state, or nation.”

These are just some of the reasons it is important to release stories of the lives of individuals living in cities. I was delighted to discover the “Spitalfields Life” blog featuring interviews with people in that area of East London. It’s on a far bigger scale than my interview blog on 30th Ave in Astoria was, but it seems the author shares similar motivations. Its “Gentle Author” (s/he aims to keep their identity anonymous) said in an interview: "I believe in microcosm, that everything in the world is here.” S/he also said: "I don't understand why everybody isn't doing what I'm doing. I don't understand why this isn't everywhere. It's free to do. It just takes time." Well yes, time is a significant factor. But here’s to many others following suit.

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Recently they knocked down two of the small houses opposite us. (How easy to refer to authorities / developers with a murky “they”). The space where one was is still a gaping hole. In the other, there’s a building site. While if we were a purely adult household that could be seen as a pain because of the noise, with little JNH around it provides endless entertainment. Each morning he asks to see the “orange digger” soon after waking up. Then when we go outside, he wants to “touch orange digger" (depending on whether it's in action or not, C and I try to oblige). He could stand for hours watching the trucks hauling their loads, the men go about their work, the brick walls ascending.

This morning, our neighbor E. was outside his front door. He’s at the opposite end of life to JNH. Now in his nineties, until a few days ago he was sprightly as if he could go on and on. Apparently he only retired about four years ago. Then he had a fall, and suddenly he seems vulnerable. He gave JHN a little green toy train when we past, then as we walked up the street he was still standing by his front door gazing up at the building work across the street.