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)

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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 117 - Crossing Sunnyside Yard in the rain

Yesterday I walked with CNH down through Astoria and Sunnyside to the 40th street stop on the 7 line. We were meeting C there, to go to have lunch at the Thai restaurant SriPraPhai in Woodside. It’s one of the few locations that pulls Manhattanites and Brooklynites to Queens – as well as drawing a big local crowd.

It was a humid day. Rain fell at times, either in a torrent or a drizzle but never enough to lift the humidity. You could see it shifting about in patches in the sky as if debating when and where to descend. It was falling as I reached the bottom of Steinway Street and embarked onto the 39th Street overpass.

The overpass is a concrete swish over Sunnyside Yard, where trains, tracks, cables and diggers make a tangled nest. The sidewalks on the overpass are narrow enough to make pedestrians feel, not quite threatened, but vulnerable, especially if pushing a stroller as I was.

On the left as you walk South is a high mesh fence that prefaces a view of the yards. On the right is another mesh fence, prefacing a view West to Manhattan. Yesterday the Manhattan skyline had shed its alluring sparkle for an even dark gray, leaving much to the imagination.

Despite the weather I was upbeat. Or was it because of the weather? There’s something wild and cleansing about a wet day, especially when it follows the glare of Summer. I was intensely conscious of time. Three years before, I had walked in the opposite direction over that overpass with C and his sister D to get beers at Astoria’s Studio Square, just pregnant with JNH but not yet aware I was. Here I was walking on the pass again with JNH’s little brother.

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Work dominates the geography of Queens (auto repair shops rub shoulders with taxi depots rub shoulders with mom-and-pop shops) while play dominates Manhattan’s.

New York missive no 114 - Old Navy on Northern Boulevard and an encounter with a fellow shopper

Part of a graffitied mural on 48th Street with Northern Boulevard

On Northern Boulevard in Queens, at its intersection with 34th Avenue and 49th Street, is a shopping center featuring a warehouse-style Old Navy (and not a great deal else). I went there yesterday morning, with CMH in his stroller. I had found myself once again post-pregnancy with practically zero summer clothes that I could wear and almost zero time to buy new ones.

Some of the online reviews of the store are not kind. One on Yelp says: “Imagine if Godzilla took a liking to eating clothing instead of humans. Then, imagine if the clothing Godzilla drank too much the night before and couldn't find a toilet/trash can, but found this Old Navy to puke in.” Others include snooty comments like, “This is a ‘must skip’” and “Pretty ghetto.”

But for this trip it was just what I needed. I walked fast through the hot Astoria streets to get there. The white muslin sheet I had draped over CMH’s stroller to keep the sun off flapped with the movement, so that from a distance it probably looked like some kind of desert apparition. We just made it over the Boulevard during the time the pedestrian crossing sign said walk: big boulevards anywhere, but especially those in Queens, are hostile to people who are not in cars.

Once inside the store CMH was making waking-up signs. I rushed around the haphazard clothing rails and piled potential purchases on top of his stroller. So far the good thing about the store was that it was far emptier than any you’d find in Manhattan so I could whizz round easily. And once in the changing rooms, the fact that each cubicle was large (so that when CMH did wake up crying I could comfortably sit down and nurse him), that the woman working there was relaxed and understanding, and that there weren’t queues of people lined up wanting to try things on all worked in my favor. I emerged better equipped, with three new pairs of pants and five tops. That kind of buying-in bulk normally nauseates me. But sometimes it’s just the easiest way to go - there are always buts to explain unethical purchasing practices, often related to convenience and even more often to price.

As I had been going around picking items to try on, a woman who was also shopping said, “my son’s a teenager now, but I remember doing that.” I wasn’t sure if she was just referring to shopping with a baby in tow, or the way I put the clothes on top of the stroller. She went on to ask if I had other kids and I told her I have a two-year-old too.

“My sisters and brothers, they had two or three kids, all of them. I had cancer when I had my son, so never had more."

Stalling a little from being plunged into her story (something I should be entirely used to by now), I replied along the lines of, “I’m glad you were able to have one.”

"Well, it is what it is,” she replied.

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 98 - A Queens Kind of Cool

Cool: “The quality of being fashionably attractive or impressive” (New Oxford American Dictionary)


(map from city-data.com)

The other day I found myself in a conversation about how Queens is starting to become cool. It got me thinking about what kind of cool.

Queens hasn’t traditionally been cool. As Nicole Steinberg put it in her introduction to “Forgotten Borough – Writers come to term with Queens”: “It’s not the prettiest borough; upon first glance, not the most memorable…It’s rare that you’ll hear people wax poetic about Queens the way they might over the concrete canyons of Manhattan or the beauteous brownstones of Brooklyn.” There are various reasons no doubt. Among them may be the fact that most people in Queens are too busy working hard to get by and to get on, than to worry about whether the borough is on the map and cool.

Last year I interviewed 52 people along 30th Avenue in Astoria, Queens – one a week. It became clear that in that neighborhood at least, there’s cool around and it’s getting more so. As that happens I hope it’s a cool that is unique to Queens, grounded in what makes Queens itself and not a boilerplate hip-ness transplanted from anywhere. There are three traits I think a Queens cool should celebrate and safeguard: diverse; entrepreneurial; and open.

Diverse: Queens is one of the most diverse places on the planet. That means that its residents have millions of inspiring stories to tell and share, most of which to date have gone undocumented as people go about their lives. They have stories about their journeys or their predecessors’ journeys, about making their home in America and “becoming” American (in whatever way that might mean), about interaction with people from cultures other than their own, and how those cultures define themselves, mix, and blur.

Technology now means that the means to record those stories is always close to hand. Barbara Ganley highlights this in an excellent report for the Orton Family Foundation, “Re-Weaving the Community – Creating the Future: Storytelling at the Heart and Soul of Healthy Communities”. She says: “Affordable voice recorders, cell phones, and digital cameras, free online editing applications and do-it-yourself publishing venues promote the individual and grassroots efforts of citizen journalists and community story-catchers.” Initiatives like the Queens Memory Project and EarSay’s “Crossing the Boulevard” are doing and encouraging just that in Queens.

Why capture and share stories? The Re-Weaving the Community report gives many reasons. But in a nutshell they identify the specific details of day-to-day life, the human details that people remember and repeat and that should be fed into any decision-making about what a neighborhood needs or doesn’t need. They help us keep real.

Entrepreneurial: Queens cool is reflected in entrepreneurs who start successful local businesses. They may remain in one place, they may expand beyond the borough, but if so they keep rooted in the community. People like Frank Arcabascio who in his “30th Ave” interview said he learned "the power of a good haircut" when he swept the floor for tips in his cousin’s barbershop as a kid, and who now runs his own chain of salons. Like Melissa Rivera, who set up her own soap-making business from her apartment. People like Halim of Harissa Café who worked his way from bus boy after arriving in New York from Algeria, to waiter, to restaurant owner (with stints as a taxi and limo driver along the way), and Sami Mobarak who decided as he approached retirement to make his passion his living by opening an antiques shop.

Open: By that I mean an environment that encourages instead of undermines interaction between people on the streets, the face-to-face exchanges that no amount of virtual social networking can substitute. On a basic level that will mean that “cool” improvements to neighborhoods bear simple geographies in mind, things like keeping sidewalks wide, and ensuring that there are places for people to perch and sit along them. It will mean that old timers and newcomers mix. It will also mean, fundamentally, that changes don’t mean re-invention. That they don’t erase the very diversity and fabric that makes Queens what it is in the first place.

Georgina Young-Ellis, who with her husband was behind the “Welling Court Mural Project” (itself an illustration of Queens cool that works) said in her interview: “There are cool local communities, where the more people who want to live here, and the more wonderful little restaurants get built, the more rents go up and the more that people who were living there a long time get driven out. Then big box stores come in and suddenly it’s not so desirable any more. It’s this whole wave of things that happen.” She added an optimistic note about her part of Queens: “I feel like right now in Astoria there’s an awareness of that wave, and an awareness of how to try to counteract it. So far I see it going in the right direction.” Long may it stay that way.

Those are three ideas. Do you agree or disagree with them? Have others to suggest?