New York missive no 101 - Thank you for your memoirs Bernado Vega

(pic from Good Reads)

The subtitle of the “Memoirs of Bernardo Vega” is “A Contribution to the History of The Puerto Rican Community in New York.” What a contribution. Vega, a ‘tabaquero’ (cigar maker) from the Puerto Rican town of Cayey, came to came to New York City in 1916 and lived there until the 1950s. The subtitle wording is typical of the modesty with which he approached the memoirs. In fact he originally wrote them in the third person as a lightly fictionalized account. His editor César Andrew Iglesias, who published the memoirs 10 years after Vega’s death, was the one who convinced him that it made much more sense as a direct memoir of his own life.

Vega describes his experiences in the city’s cigar factories, and grim stints in other professions when that work was hard to come by: in a munitions factory, in an underwater cellar making antiseptics, as an assistant then accountant to an abusive rag trader, for example. He talks about his involvement in socialist and union movements, the city’s Spanish-speaking newspapers and his ownership and editorship of the paper Gráfico. At times the narrative is choppy, probably because of the switch from third to first person and his motivation to tell a much broader story than this own. In a 1955 preface he had said “an honest recollection was needed, a memoir telling of how Puerto Ricans have lived and what they have accomplished in New York.”

So while his work and politics play an important role, his personal life barely features. A couple of wives and two children by the first just get fleeting references and are not named. With reference to the first wife he says, “Here I must insert a very personal note: I married a Puerto Rican girl. This, of course, has nothing to do with anything…” Meanwhile people involved in political struggles are sometimes listed in dense paragraphs of names as if to be sure that everyone he respected had at least a mention in the book. A portion early in the book switches to the perspective of Vega’s uncle Antonio, in order to tell the story of Cuba and Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence from Spain and the role played from New York.

The last chapter breaks off after just a page as Vega is about to get involved with Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party (he worked as national director of the party’s Hispanic section while Wallace ran for the presidency). The chapter’s title is “An unfinished chapter with an unwritten moral: it is always more interesting to live than to write.” Thank God he did write. Through the choppiness of the narrative comes a deep portrait of a particular community at a particular moment in time. A portrait that as I read, I was acutely aware would not have been recorded, at least in nothing like the same detail, had Bernado Vega not decided to set it down on paper.

Here are some excerpts just to give a glimpse. On “readers” in the cigar factories:

“A few days later I found work at another cigar factory. ‘El Morito’ (‘The Little moor’), on 86th Street off Third Avenue, a few steps from where I was living. At that wonderful place I struck up friendships with a lot of Cubans, Spaniards, and some fellow countrymen, all of whom awakened in me an eagerness to study…

“At that time the official ‘reader' was Fernando García. He would read to us for one hour in the morning and one in the afternoon. He dedicated the morning session to current news and events of the day…The afternoon sessions were devoted to more substantial readings of a political and literary nature…It used to be that a factory reader would choose the texts himself, and they were mostly light reading…But as they developed politically, the workers had more and more to say in the selection. Their preference for works of social theory won out. From then on the readings were most often from books by Gustave LeBon, Ludwig Buchner, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Bakunin…And let me tell you, I never knew a single tabaquero who fell asleep.

“The institution of factory readings made the tabaqueros into the most enlightened sector of the working class. The practice began in the factories of Viñas & Co., in Bejucal, Cuba, around 1864. Of course there were readings before then, but they weren’t daily. Emigrants to Key West and Tampa introduced the practice into the United States around 1869- at least, I was told that in that year the shop owned by Martínez Ibor in Key West had an official reader.” (pg. 22-3)

On snow in the winter of 1932:

“By that time 15 million workers were unemployed. New York was one of the cities most seriously affected. The winter of 1932 was particularly harsh, and in the middle of February the whole city was blanketed in snow. Around twelve thousand men were hired by City Hall to clean up the streets. Many Puerto Ricans jumped at the opportunity to make some money, and what a sight it was to see them all wrapped up in rags, their necks covered with old newspapers, swinging their shovels and shivering to the bone.” (pg. 170)

During WW2 Vega worked in the postal censorship office, first reading soldiers’ letters home to their families then in the “international department”, where among other things he kept a file on Nazi agents in Latin America. Of the Puerto Ricans working there he says:

“There were over a thousand Puerto Ricans working in postal censorship in New York. For the duration of the war not one was promoted to an executive position of any standing…[O]ver 80 percent of the Puerto Ricans who applied for employment at the censor’s office and took the Federal Civil Service examination demonstrated a command of at least two languages, as well as other qualifications. No other nationality had such a high average. On to top of that, I can attest to the magnificent work performed by our countrymen. And yet we Puerto Ricans are still regarded as in incompetent people who never reached maturity…The truth is that those of us who get anywhere in this country must be superior to our equals.” (pg. 208).

New York missive no 100 - an N train commute, Whitney Houston and Christopher Hitchens

C’s poem about Christopher Hitchens ends with the lines

The thing about death
is how efficiently
it silences.

Those lines sprung to mind again on my N-train subway commute the other morning. Two people along from me a woman was listening to Whitney Houston at full blast on her headphones. It was a couple of days after Houston had died, and there was her distinctive voice accompanying Queens-dwellers on their way into work: I Will Always Love You, I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me), Where Do Broken Hearts Go? The woman with the headphones wasn’t crying but was visibly upset as she listened. It annoyed me how little notice everyone took, or at least how consciously they seemed to be pretending they couldn’t hear.

On one hand it was a reminder that artists secure some kind of afterlife through their creations; they can be read, listened to, watched, after they have died. But that also makes death's silencing all the more dramatic. The carriage was full of an immensely powerful voice that would never sing again.

I then noticed that the woman sitting in between me and the Whitney Houston fan was reading Hitchen's autobiography Hitch 22, published soon before he died last year.

That’s two rather morbid posts in a row. I’m five months pregnant. I wonder if that has anything to do with it: amplified hormones and all that.

New York Missive no 99 - Tyler Clementi's suicide and not knowing others' minds

The New Yorker published a big piece by Ian Parker recently called "The Story of A Suicide - Two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy". One of the roomates is Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge in 2010. The other is Dharun Ravi who is currently facing charges including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation (hate crimes). He and another student used a webcam to watch Clementi in an embrace with a man. Ravi talked about it on Twitter, and then two days later attempted to set up another viewing, inviting others to join in. Of course the precise causal link between the webcam spying and Tyler’s decision to jump will never be known.

What struck me most about the article was how much of a person remains unknown, even to those closest to them. Tyler’s parents say that they never saw signs of depression in him. The article ends with this paragraph:

On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, “I told him not to hurt himself.” Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. “We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, ‘I would never do anything like that.'"

On my walk back from the subway station after reading the article the paragraph hung with me. My thoughts went riffing beyond this case to the way in which we never know others’ minds.

What do we do inside our boxes? Accept that we don’t know at all what goes on inside others’? Or do our best to know? Try to reach over and inside, in the full awareness that we can’t really know?

The process always comes back to yourself, like it or not. What you think you learn when you reach over – whether right or wrong – ultimately comes from your own box and back into it. But it’s worth the effort. Something changes on the way; what returns is more than a reflection.

And this is one of the reasons we write.

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?

New York missive no 97 - "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" stands the test of time

Recently I read William H. Whyte’s “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.” It recounts the results of "The Street Life Project”, which he began in 1970. Over a period of three years Whyte and his researchers observed and filmed “16 plazas, 3 small parks, and a number of odds and ends" in New York City. They examined how people used those spaces, how long they stayed, where and how they sat. In essence they looked for what made a small urban space work (like sunlight, water that people can interact with, the presence of food vendors, openness to the street, moveable chairs) and what didn’t (such as the absence or opposites of those things).

The researchers’ persistence in promoting their results paid off when in 1975 the City Planning Commission incorporated their recommendations into a new open-space zoning code. Since 1961 developers had already been incentivized to provide public plaza space; they were permitted 10 more feet of commercial floor area for each square foot of plaza space that they provided. The 1975 changes required that those plazas be amenable to the public as well as simply existing. And it asked them to provide a sign informing people of how the plaza is amenable:

“A plaque or other permanent sign shall be displayed in a prominent location on any urban open space for which a bonus is granted. Such sign shall indicate number of trees, and number of movable chairs, and any other features whose listing may be required by the City Planning Commission, the name of the owner and whomever he has designated to maintain the urban open space.”

Now as I go around the city I keep noticing the public plazas ensconced between soaring office buildings, and their accompanying plaques. Like the plaza between 29 and 30th Streets near Sixth Avenue. Here’s its plaque:



And the towering building that owns it, 835 Sixth Ave:



And one of the two “Weeping European Beeches,” next to the “reflecting pool.”



The style of Whyte’s book, while short and readable, seems a bit dated now in a 1980s textbook way (it was published in 1980). But the new plazas that appear with their shiny plaques are testament to the durability of his ideas. Human habits change little, it seems. If you observe them long and closely enough you will come to conclusions that stand the test of time.

Not that new additional features aren't introduced of course. The 385 Sixth Avenue plaza has a huge film screen on one wall that shows peaceful landscapes, or conceptual video art, or sports events in the summer time.

New York missive no 96 - Occupy Wall Street, the map of Taiwan, slavery in rural & urban areas

The man on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 28th Street comes and goes. When he’s gone he invariably leaves a trace, like this one.

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My fascination with all things maps continues. I learned recently that Taiwan is sometimes referred to as a sweet potato because that’s what its shape looks like when viewed on a N-S map. And that when viewed W-E it looks like a whale.

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Recently I finally read Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. One of the many things that struck me about it was his descriptions of the differences between how slaves were treated in the city and the countryside. Such as this one:

“I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the plantation. He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity of his nonslaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave…”

It made me think about cruelty in urban and rural areas today. Can the same be said, that in an urban area people are more aware of what their neighbors are doing so they behave better? The density of housing is such that in many cases I’m sure that’s not the case anymore: abuses can be buried in the crowd, and even when they’re noticed often people won’t want to intervene, hardened as they are by it, or used as they are to not interfering with others’ business.

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I think that ports and peripheries are where the heart of a city can be found. In Manhattan, not that it’s a city in and of itself, there is little port and periphery left. But there are remnants of them on the far West side of Midtown. A few Saturdays ago J and I arrived over there early for his swimming class. He was asleep so I passed the time walking in a loop down to the river and back, along streets in the 50s.

On the walk we passed symbols of how the city functions. Of how the basic dynamic is one of wealthy people living it up and poor people working to keep them doing so. We passed gleaming car garages. I had no idea there were so many out that way. The cars posed in their glass-walled showrooms like frozen zoo animals. We saw two massive docked cruise liners spewing out their passengers who emerged onto the city streets with an air of conquest, and spewing out their workers who crossed over the West Side Highway straight to a call center to speak with home. We got a glimpse into the stable where the horses who pull carriages for tourists in Central Park are kept. It was gloomy in there. And we saw a man cleaning out the stable, tipping horse poo into a steaming bin.

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I’m glad that the Occupy Wall Street protests and related movements around the world are focused on national governments. That’s as opposed to past protests with more international targets, like the 1999 “Battle in Seattle” against the World Bank. Because ultimately it is the governments that individuals, in democracies, have voted into power, and so we should, if things were functioning ok, have some influence over how that power is used. The fact that we don’t is the heart of the matter.

I recently re-read the final chapter of Joel Bakan’s The Corporation and again was convinced by his argument: that given corporations in their current form are only legally accountable to their shareholders they cannot be expected to act in anyone’s interests but their own unless compelled to by the governments that created them (“incorporated”) them in the first place. “Many among the corporate elite and their defenders would likely sing ‘Hallelujah' the day activists against corporate abuse abandoned government,” he says.


(sign down in Zuccotti Park)

New York missive no 95 - The 9/11 memorial trees; and "Hopper's Vision of New York"

Since 9/11 beautiful clear days in NYC have an ominous tinge. One morning last week the sky was a pristine blue. The temperature was like body temperature with a slight breeze to keep things fresh. The city contents were enhanced by clean light: its skyward walls, yellow cabs, the passing faces of people weaving fast along the sidewalks etc. etc. All that beauty felt fragile.

Maybe that’s even more the case at the moment given that the tenth anniversary of 9/11 has just gone by, along with its saturated media coverage. I’d just caught snippets, thankfully, due to a 16-month-old JNH now permanently on the move. But I did see a bit of a documentary about the making of the 9/11 memorial, and in particular the bit about its trees.

They are about 400 swamp white oak and sweetgum trees. They’ve been cultivated at an arboretum in New Jersey, and must be among the most tended-to trees on the planet. Prior to their re-location to the memorial site each one had its own tub, with regulated conditions including a feeding and irrigation system. Each had its own perfect, private ecosystem carefully controlled by man.

There’s a video about the trees here.

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In the big New York Times “Book of New York” – a collection of 549 of the newspaper’s articles about the city – there’s a piece from 7 September 1980 by Alfred Kazin, called “Hopper’s Vision of New York.” I love its last two paragraphs. Sometimes in the thick of the daily rush a piece of prose, a poem, or a painting holds things still. What I like about these two paragraphs is that they do that, while discussing paintings which do that too.

“...But there was one exception to the cozy, picturesque painters of New York: Edward Hopper. Unlike so many American paintings just before and after World War II, 'representational' and 'abstract' alike, his work was not slap-dash, hurried, theatrically self-conscious. The immensely tall, immensely quiet man I often saw walking in Greenwich Village seemed tensely alone; he reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s impression of Robinson Crusoe – 'a man staring at a pot.'

"Hopper for me was like his unprecedented paintings of solitary people staring at the glass in New York bedrooms, coffee shops and offices. Perhaps he had taken the advice of the philosopher Wittgenstein: ‘Don’t think! LOOK!’ Yet you could not have guessed what the handsome man was looking at as he edged his way through Washington Square park. His figures never looked through the glass they were facing. Their masked, identical hawklike faces were concentrated in thought unavailable to anyone, perhaps, especially to themselves.”