New York missive no 133 - A tower rises on 30th Street

There is a skyscraper going up on the North East corner of Sixth Avenue and 30th Street. A notice says that the planned completion date is April 2016. One would have thought that conveys time's sprawl. So many months! Instead, the construction seems to have the opposite effect, when I walk past each day on my way to work. It contracts time.

I can’t remember what was there before the building site, what was torn down. But I do remember when the foundation pit was a gaping square hole in the ground (reminiscent of others). I remember when hoardings went up around it, so you could only see the site by peering through diamond-shaped holes cut out of the splintery timber, when the cranes arrived (“New York Crane & Equipment Corp”), then when the second floor rose up above the hoardings bringing workers with their yellow hats up into view from the sidewalk.

So many phases, so much time, but I know that one day I will be walking by the completed tower, observing the stores that occupy the ground floor, then craning my neck up, up, to its top, surrounded by all the other skyscrapers it has joined there. The whole thing may as well have happened in the blink of an eye.

New York missive no 82 - Looking up, a big bee, stealing, Anna Quindlan on motherhood

I passed a man on the corner of 6th Ave and 31st street, gazing up at a point in the sky a couple of blocks South. Then I realized that he wasn’t gazing up at the sky. (Of course not. Who looks at the sky in Manhattan?). He was looking up a towering new block of apartments. A Manhattan experience, gazing upwards, dreaming you can be higher. When you reach the top of one of those buildings though, don’t you feel a bit removed from the life going on so far below?

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At the International Diamond Conference on Thursday Peter Singer said that stealing is a crime unless, for example, you’re stealing millions in oil profits from Angola or Equatorial Guinea. By chance in the subway on my way home I overheard a Polish guy say to the woman sitting next to him, “In America if you steal a loaf of bread you’re a thief. If you’re a corporation stealing a few hundred thousand here and there you get away with it. You can pay for the lawyers to get you off the hook.”

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A huge bee careened into our living room a few weeks ago, black and bigger than a hornet. It crashed drunkenly into walls and the ceiling then the bars of a hanging metal lamp. C was trying to hit it with a rolled magazine and for some reason my fear was more intense than with any normal bee. This one was huge. And the presence of little J on the floor nearby further jangled my nerves. Each time C thwacked and hit the metal but missed the bee I felt its anger grow and imagined a deadly sting. Then it committed suicide. It flew into the glass bowl lamp on the kitchen ceiling and whirled there buzzing, buzzing until frazzled it lay still. You could see the black shape up through the clouded glass, a smudge. Yesterday I happened to look up at the lamp and it was gone. C told me he’d taken it out when he changed the bulb. I felt sad, like I’d missed something, the chance to see that great bee right up close and not be afraid.

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In this interview with Charlie Rose, the journalist Anna Qindlan says of her youth, “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have kids, which shows how much I know.”
“Because…?” asks Charlie Rose.
“Because they’ve taught me about ninety percent of what I know that’s worth knowing.”
After these five months of being a mother I know just what she means.

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I copied a friend's idea and took a series of photos on my way into work to post on Facebook. The process of taking the pictures made me notice so much more than usual, of course. So now on my journey in I try to remember to photograph the things I see, even if only in my mind.



A woman looks out over midtown.