Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo - part 3 - Roosevelt Island: Perspective

This is part three of my seven-part essay "Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo." Introduction and part one. Part two.

Via Socrates Sculpture Park and Vernon Boulevard we find ourselves on Roosevelt Island Bridge, which links the island to the borough of Queens. Until now I did not know the bridge existed. A notice half way across says that in 1955 it received an award of merit for the “most beautiful steel bridge” from the American Institute of Steel Construction. I am not surprised. It is a dark red color. Its tall structure recalls the railroad gantries a little further South in Long Island City that hauled cargo from ship to train. It has that thrill of soaring metal that so many of the New York City bridges do. Conrad’s stroller, which is not big, just about fits across the width of the walkway that is squeezed between whipping traffic and the drop to the river below. There is a wire mesh fence between us and the river but that does little to break the sense of threat.

The island has been put to many uses over time. Dutch settlers ran pig farms on it. In the 1830s, a prison and the New York Lunatic Asylum were built; undercover reporter Nellie Bly exposed the horrendous conditions at the asylum by spending ten days there. “In the upper halls,” she wrote, “a good view is obtained of the passing boats and New York. I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.”

The island, which for a while was called Welfare Island, was also the site of a smallpox hospital. The hospital ruins remain. They are floodlit at night and from Manhattan look like a hollow-eyed ghost facing the river. Soon after moving to New York I bought a book, Invisible Frontier – Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York. I bought it in the now-closed Blackburn bookstore on Broadway in Astoria. Little did I know that within four years I would be raising my children in the neighborhood. In the book a group of urban explorers sets about almost-inaccessible parts of the city, including the smallpox hospital. They describe a precarious clamber over crumbling brick walls clad in foliage, opening their account of the exploration with two lines from T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land:

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?”

Today, the mostly un-ruined Roosevelt Island consists of chunky apartment buildings, many of them home to people who work at the United Nations building across the river.

We cross through to the Western side of the island (it is less than a kilometer wide) and do a loop over its Northern tip, pausing for a while in a park with a view across to Manhattan. Among Manhattan’s squeezed streets it is easy to forget that it too is an island, despite what you might think would be wake-up calls in the form of hurricanes like Sandy that hit a couple of months after our walks in the city. From here the geography is more apparent. We are close to the water with its choppy current and it is not difficult to flash back a few hundred years to when Native Americans navigated it in their canoes. The backsides of the Manhattan buildings look like temporary appendages.

On the top tip of the island is a small lighthouse. It has not been used since the 1940s. I have seen it so many times from the Astoria shore that it feels disorienting now to be standing here, as if I should be looking across the water at myself. A couple on bicycles swoops around the lighthouse. Then it is just Conrad and me and the splashing water and a wide sky. Open spaces like this within the city are like a deep breath. On the concrete river wall are traces of crab shell – some pincers and a cracked back – the remnants of a seagull’s dinner. I read the small plaque at the bottom of the lighthouse in memory of Vicki Holland, a polio patient who was treated on the island before living in an apartment here, and who campaigned for disability rights. Randomly-encountered inscriptions like this are quiet voices on behalf of people who have gone, just enough to say for some time afterwards, “I existed, remember me.”

Walking back down the Eastern side of the island we pass the Fire Department of New York’s Special Operations Command Division. Small fire trucks and vans are clustered outside. Firefighters in ceremonial uniforms talk beside them. It is only then that I realize the date, immersed as I am in my and Conrad’s world. It is September 11, the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Later I hear a little about the day’s events and how purposefully understated they are compared with the previous anniversary, the tenth. The emphasis now is on a respectful acknowledgement of those who lost their lives, a pause to reconnect then carry on. More inscriptions, this time painted onto the window of one of the trucks:

DC Raymond Downey

DC Charlie Kasper

DC John Paolillo

BC John Moran

Part four: Astoria (day): Power

Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo - part 2 - Central Park: Time

This is part two of my seven-part essay "Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo." The introduction and part one are here.

This walk isn't going to be a walk. Rain is forecast so I decide to go with Conrad to the Guggenheim. I do not know what exhibitions are on but think if we are going to be indoors, that is a fine place to be. We get the N train and I misremember that the museum is just a few blocks up from the Southern edge of the park. We disembark at the Fifth Avenue stop at the park’s South East corner, when I realize that it is much further up – at 89th Street, beyond the Met. There is still an hour until it opens, so clearly a walk up the park was meant to happen after all.

The rain threatens but does not fall as people in the park go about their early morning rituals. Among them are office workers talking into hands-free headphones. I recall hearing about the Summer evenings when my maternal grandfather decided to walk all the way home from work through London parks, a distance of about seven miles. He would set out from the engineering firm Binnie & Partners where he worked in Artillery House, on Artillery Row, and walk through

St. James’s Park

Green Park

Hyde Park

(then roads for a bit)

Regent’s Park

Primrose Hill

Parliament Fields

Hampstead Heath

and to his home in Highgate.

This being next to the Upper East Side, there are also well-groomed dogs out on walks with their owners, and white children with their dark skinned nannies. Soon before Conrad’s elder brother Jack was born, I had read the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s account of bringing up his children around here. It is called Through the Children’s Gate, after an entrance to the park at Fifth Avenue and 76th Street. “On most days you can’t even read its name,” Gopnik writes of the gate, “since a hot-dog-and-pretzel vendor parks his cart and his melancholy there twelve hours a day, right in front of where the stone is engraved.” The book captures some of the universality of childhood, along with a lot of a rarefied experience of child-rearing, one in which parents intellectualize the decisions involved – from coat purchase to school selection – deliberating over how those decisions will affect the child and how they will be perceived by others.

Splashes of bright yellow leaves are starting to appear on dark branches. The yellow echoes the taxis that are gliding along the roads and triggering a stream of memories of past Central Park walks. Here comes a walk up to the Jackie Kennedy Onassis reservoir one evening as dusk was falling, soon after I moved to the city. I felt like I was racing nightfall. There are my morning walks down the West side of the park, when I lived at 109th Street and sometimes went by foot to Columbus Circle where I got on the subway to work. Now I see the time that I was meeting a friend on the East side and wanted to cut through the park from the West. My mind wandered as well as my feet and I found myself an hour later back on the West side again. Here is the bright November day when Carlos proposed in a hut beside the lake.

In The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead describes how a different New York exists for each of its inhabitants. A travel agency will for someone else always be the pizza parlor that they knew it as, which for someone else will be the beauty parlor soon to open at the same site. “Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.” The city is a morass of memory. Carlos often says that, having been born and brought up here, wherever he walks there are memories to haunt him. Even for me many neighborhoods already jostle with them. The memories hanging about on the streets and hunched in entranceways can start to feel oppressive. But the city saves us from them too. There is always the next distraction that pulls our attention and keeps us afloat.

We pass the small lake called Conservatory Water, where I buy a bottle of water from a kiosk. A woman approaches with her son, carrying a remote controlled sail-boat. The son is about nine years old. “Do you know if it’s ok to sail anytime?” she asks the kiosk vendor.

“No,” comes the brief reply.

“Well we’re going to do it,” the woman announces. “They don’t have any signs.” She takes her little boy by the hand and off they go to the water’s edge.

We continue. The chance that at any moment it may rain or Conrad may wake up, or both at once, keeps me moving. My attention is absorbed by the present again. Here I am on a morning walk in Central Park, smelling the trees and with little Conrad asleep on my chest, and soon it too will be a memory. When I write the moment down it may be preserved but only to the extent that hieroglyphs capture anything of ancient Egyptians’ lives.

At 79th Street we exit the park onto Fifth Avenue. A row of construction workers sits on a ledge in front of the Met, which is about to open. They are art enough for me, I think. That said, I still carry on towards the Guggenheim.

Tourists mill outside then form an orderly line to filter in when the security guard announces that we can enter. “This his first museum visit?” a woman asks me of Conrad, who is now awake. I tell her he has been to the British Museum too. Once inside we learn that the main part of the museum, the galleries that spiral around the air in the center of the building, is closed to visitors while an exhibition on “Picasso Black and White” is hung. The side galleries are still open. From them we can see across to the spirals and get glimpses of Picasso faces looking back at us. There are also rows of flat crates marked FRAGILE and THIS WAY UP. People in jeans and t-shirts maneuver canvases on wheels.

Conrad is hungry. I nurse him in a small room of Kandinsky paintings. One is called “Simple Pleasures”.

On to photographs by Rineke Dijkstra. Some of her photo series freeze moments to convey passing time: a woman is photographed at intervals from childhood to motherhood, a French soldier periodically throughout his career. Other series show different people in a similar setting. There is one of adolescents on the beach at resort towns:

Brighton, England

Coney Island, USA

Kolobrzeg, Poland

Odessa, Ukraine

etc.

And a series of naked mothers just after they have given birth, holding their newborns.

Part 3: Roosevelt Island: Perspective

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

New York missive no 128 - Dubai interlude

A dhow being loaded with goods in Dubai Creek, bound for Somalia. One of its crew told us it's a good thing the boat looks old and run down - that means it is not tempting to pirates.

Recently my colleague from Beirut and I went on a work visit to United Arab Emirates. We were mainly in Dubai but also spent a day in Abu Dhabi and a morning in Sharjah. On the last evening in Dubai we went for a meal with members of my colleague’s family – some of whom live there – at a restaurant on the Emirates’ “Palm Jumeirah”, a palm-shaped island tagged onto the coast by its trunk (which is also an eight-lane motorway). The island didn’t exist until the early 2000s when it was built by dredging and dumping tons of sand in the form of a palm tree, to extend the city’s beachfront area by 40 miles for the development of luxury apartments and hotels.

As we left the mainland part of the city we became snarled in a traffic jam. They are not uncommon in Dubai because, other than the two-line metro, the only way to get around is by car. No-one walks. Sidewalks are rare, so in many parts of the city it is impossible to. In this case the snarl was caused by a deep construction ditch down the middle of the road. Similar, perhaps to the ditch in which two Indian workers, Ram Kumar and Selvaraj, were buried alive in the nearby city of Al Ain soon after our visit, when the sand on each side of the trench collapsed as they tried to fix a pipe.

Once on Palm Jumeirah the traffic subsided. But it still took around half an hour to reach the restaurant as the car slid through curved bright-lit underpasses along streets lined with pristine buildings around bends back through the same underpasses and over bridges seemingly trapped in a road-loop designed to prevent us from getting to our destination. Reach it we did, eventually. We ate a barbeque meal with a view across to the winking city. The open-air restaurant was flanked on two sides by apartments and on the other by a sleek swimming pool. On an apartment balcony a small girl twirled pirouettes to the restaurant music while her parents, or whoever was taking care of her, set the table beside her.

The structure of a city like Dubai where you are forced to drive creates separation. It's a divide that is echoed everywhere - in the fact that public life takes place largely in air-conditioned malls constructed on desert, for example. The separation is necessary in that it makes the circumstances of the city tolerable through denial: a capitalist dystopia dressed up as utopia where you can get your apartment re-decorated for $50, where you can earn double (or more than, anyway) you would earn on the rice fields at home by working at the teetering steel pinnacle of a tower block in the 100 degree sun.

As Daniel Brook puts it in “A History of Future Cities" though, it is not helpful to view Dubai as all awe or all horror as tends to be the case:

“Apologists for Dubai, like architect Rem Koolhaas, who salivates over the city-state as ‘the ultimate tabula rasa on which new identities can be inscribed,’ cannot explain away the barbarism of its system: one that assembles all the world’s people but makes no attempt to treat them all like people. Those who condemn Dubai, like urban theorist mike Davis who tars it as an ‘evil paradise’ cannot explain the allure of the city for the hundreds of thousands of low-wage guest workers who have migrated there.”

The unobserved shades of grey are there within individual inhabitants but somehow get lost when you look at the whole. They are there within people like Adil, a taxi driver who we came across outside the Jumeirah Lake Towers. JLT is one of the city’s many free trade zones, this one a conglomeration of over 70 skyscrapers with 6000 businesses, centered around commodities trading. Here the traffic was snarled too, as it is every day. The towers were mostly finished a few years ago but the roads between them were not.

Adil’s experience in UAE is bittersweet. He spent his first few years paying off the fees for getting his job in Dubai, with the state-run taxi firm Dubai Taxi. He works long hours, sometimes to the extent he knows he is driving dangerously from tiredness. He still has to pay a large chunk of what he earns each day back to the company, which still holds his passport, and which only allows him to go back to Bangladesh once a year. He finds that especially difficult because he has a young daughter there. He said he was living for the next time he can go back. And yet, Adil said his situation is far better than that of Jumeirah taxi drivers (the Emirate where he lives), and of his friends who worked on construction sites. He wants to stay some years, perhaps earn enough to buy his own car to run a taxi service on his own terms.

The situation in UAE is kept on a relatively even keel by the synthesis of economic dreams and absolute social control by the government. At times, frustration when the former are not realized threatens the latter. In May thousands of workers at the Emirati construction firm Arabtec went on strike, demanding better wages. Reuters just reported that the strike happened and, a few days later, that Arabetc said it had resolved the dispute, without saying if the workers’ demands had been met. Many of those involved in the strike were deported.

Not surprisingly, voices from the workers themselves were missing. But a reporter for Al Jazeera (which is headquartered in neighboring Qatar), stood by the Arabetc workers’ camp gates – they weren’t allowed inside – to gathere a few testimonies. One, for example said, “I have not gotten a raise in the last nine years. The strike ended because of pressure from higher management and police. People are scared. It is possible this will happen again because conditions are so bad.”

This week I was immensely privileged to listen to a conversation between Henry Belafonte and Dolores Huerta, looking back at the civil rights movement in the US to inform its future. Playwright Bryonn Bain chaired the discussion. He kicked it off by quoting Martí’s “radical no es más que eso: el que va a las raíces,” - “to be radical is simply to go to the roots." The roots are in all of us. We need to put our ear to the ground more often and listen to what is going on down there.

New York missve no 127 - Attention

A wish from a wish tree in Socrates Sculpture Park

I’ve recently stumbled across points people have made about attention, and how it is a neglected value. It was the focus of a commencement address by author Jonathan Safran Foer. He describes how he saw a teenage girl crying into her phone saying “I know, I know, I know…Mama, I know,” and how burying himself in his own smartphone made the option of not intervening a lot easier. He goes on to quote Simone Weil - “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” – and says, “By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.”

Then I read the obituary of a priest who had pretty much spent his life giving attention to people who needed it. He had said his work was “heaven on the way to heaven.” (I'm not considering becoming a priest to find out).

And then an extract from the commencement address by Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark. He talks about how he had always passed a group of kids in the lobby of his building and sometimes hung out with them. One of them stood out as being like his father, for his “quick wit, that great swagger.” Later as he campaigned for mayor and during his first months in office he had less time to spend with them. After coming home from a murder scene at which, as mayor, he had talked about the need to rally to fight crime, he read through the day’s incident reports on his blackberry and only then realized that the victim had been that boy on the stairwell who reminded him of his Dad. “As you put your sights on your goals…” he said, “don’t forget what is right in front of you today.”

I just realized that all of those three pieces were from the New York Times. That’s shocking. Time to diversify reading material. Though recently I’ve been trying to read more fiction than news.

Speaking of attention, being in the presence of young children forces it to some extent. One of my most memorable times last weekend was with JNH, closely following a small bee as it moved from clover flower to clover flower in Astoria Park.

Two more wishes from that tree in Socrates Sculpture Park:

New York missive no 126 - Home

The day in November 2009 when we came apartment-hunting in Astoria was gray. We saw two places, the second of which is where we live now, about which more below. Then I decided I wanted to check out the nearest park. We took the least scenic route. We walked up 31st Street under the elevated subway track – an oxymoron, but so it is – then went left along Astoria Boulevard with its roaring traffic and gloomy new apartment buildings that offer luxury but convey nothing of the sort.

We reached the Southern edge of Astoria Park, and then the running track at the foot of the towering Triborough Bridge. As far as I remember there was no-one running. Luckily the grayness wasn’t enough to deter us from moving here. It was such a different scene to the one recently, three and a bit years later, albeit in just the same spot by the running track. The sun was shining and the track, by now so familiar, was busy, though no-one was taking the running too seriously as this was mid-morning on a Sunday. JNH, who will turn three in May, asked C to run with him and off they went jogging around the track while I watched, holding 10-month-old CMH.

I was struck by the randomness with which a place becomes known so intimately. What if we hadn’t come to Astoria that day in November? (C had emailed me in the morning saying “what about Astoria, check out these links on Craigslist.”) Would it still have become home? Would the stretch of shops between Crescent and 30th Ave subway station, for example, be unknown to me, rather than sunk into my memory – however long we end up staying here – as the place we walked every day when my children were young?

The apartment we chose is in a semi-detached three story-house, so our building has six units. In many ways its dynamics are typical of Astoria. There is a mix of newcomers and old timers. (Click pic to read it):

About a year ago, the two houses in front of us were knocked down. The space became a building site. JNH was thrilled because that meant trucks and diggers. The foundations seemed to take ages but now finally the apartment building is going up: the first floor is there. Buildings like it are springing up all over Astoria, and their apartments are far more expensive than the old ones in the neighborhood. They have names like “The Elizabeth”, “The ‘L’ @ 30th Drive”, “The Luxe” and “Crescent View.” I wonder what this one will be called. J’s uncle was watching the construction work recently, and I asked him if he knew whether the plane tree just in front of it was going to stay. He said yes. I thought he probably would be disappointed by the building, another concrete block going up, albeit smaller than the huge one that towers behind our back yard. Instead he said, “it’s good. We’ll get lots of new neighbors.”

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

Earlier this week a big bunch of pink helium balloons was perched outside a house two doors along from JNH’s Montessori. “It’s a girl,” one proclaimed. Another was in the shape of a stork. A man was coming up to the front door with his dog and his neighbor called across her congratulations. The man said thanks, then yelled at his dog to get in the house “NOW!”, his anger seeming most out sync with the occasion.

New York missive no 125: The Bronx is Burning, technology, Stumptown Coffee

I just finished reading Ladies & Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, by journalist Jonathan Mahler. C had recommended it to me, prompted by the death of former NYC mayor Ed Koch who features in the book. He pulled his hardback copy off the shelf and said “I think you’ll like this.” He knows I like reading books about NYC and enjoyed it himself. And it has added significance for him, as it recounts an era in the city’s life – 1977 –when he was a five year-old growing up in Washington Heights, just old enough to have some isolated memories. (It also happens to be the year in which I was born, in London).

When the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, Mahler was in the middle of researching the looting and arson that flared during the power-failure in July 1977, when the whole city was plunged into darkness. He acknowledges the events were not on the same scale – an act of terror that killed thousands, and a powercut. But he says, “both were extraordinarily trying moments for the city, and I couldn’t help pondering how different New York felt in their respective wakes.” After 9/11, “there was a sense that our tallest towers had been felled but that our foundation was more secure than ever.” After the 1977 blackout, “New York had felt shaken to its core, and America had been anything but sympathetic.”

1977 was a transformative year for the city, too. Disintegration was accompanied by rehabilitation. The book weaves the seemingly disparate stories of the mayoral race involving Bella Abzug, Abe Beame, Mario Cuomo and the ultimately victorious Ed Koch, the tabloid wars between the New York Daily News and the New York Post (plus Murdoch’s Murdoch-ization of the latter), the search for the serial killer Son of Sam, the blackout, and the infighting within the New York Yankees, who went on to win the World Series at the end of the year. Mahler originally intended the Yankees to be the subject of the book but the city soon took the foreground.

I was amused and not at all surprised to discover that while some neighborhoods were razed by looting during the blackout and Greenwich Village was the scene of candlelit dinners, on Weehawken Street in far-flung West Village a gay orgy took place. (Weehawken Street is where I lived on first moving to NYC). Mahler quotes the recollections of one participant, as told in the magazine Michael’s Thing: “The small one block was a beehive of made insane activity…Nudity was the rule; many guys were pushed against cars and performed upon with the full consent of everyone there.”

Bushwick in Brooklyn was the area worst hit by the looting. Instead of conveying the chaos and moving on, Mahler stops to trace the neighborhood’s trajectory over the preceding twenty years to look for the reasons why. And when it comes to describing the arson fires in Bushwick, which had begun in 1969, he explains why the design of the buildings made them prone to fire and the way the fire teams had to tackle them. The often wooden buildings, with air shafts over their stairwells, were connected by attic spaces that made is easy for the fire to spread from one building to the next. Fire fighters would poke holes in the roof of a burning building to try to lure the flames upwards. Either they climbed through smoke and flames to do that from the inside, or hung from a ladder outside, “right in the line of fire the instant the flames started licking toward the sky.”

Another nugget I’ll share here. It's a description of a typical New Yorker. During the police search for Son of Sam, Rupert Murdoch put one of his strongest reporters, fellow Australian Steve Dunleavy, on the story (he was determined not to be outdone by Jimmy Breslin at the Daily News, who at one point received a personal letter from the killer). The book mentions that Mario Cuomo described Dunleavy later in a profile as a real New Yorker (aside from his right-wing politics): “he’s feisty, he’s resilient, he’s self-made, he stands up for what he believes in, and he can even, on occasion, be charming.” That description fits so many New Yorkers, including Ed Koch.

The Bronx is Burning is such a great read not just because of Mahler’s meticulous reporting combined with pacy storytelling skills, though they are critical, but also because he hit upon such a rich and compelling subject. Disparate narrative subjects are linked effortlessly by a single theme, that of a city at a turning point. For me the book is a reminder that it is only by slowing down to that extent – for example by telling the story of one year in a life of a city in such meticulous detail – that you can ever begin to get to the heart of things.

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A story that should be told in that level of detail but I doubt ever will be is that of brothers Toor Jan, 11, and Andul Wodood, 12. In Feburary they were out collecting firewood with their donkeys in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, when they were killed by gunfire from a NATO helicopter. The donkeys were killed too. The new US commander in Afghanistan, General Dunford, said the killings were an accident and apologized. Which of course he should, but I doubt any apology could ever be enough for the parents of those boys.

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There’s something disconcerting about the endless flick between twitter accounts, hit of send and receive buttons or scrolls down Facebook pages. It is a search for affirmation. As if that flick or hit or scroll will turn up something wonderful, something that recognizes that you, yes you, are the best being on the planet but no, of course that ever happens, so we just set ourselves up for a series of disappointments by searching cyberspace that way, it’s all a bit ridiculous, but still we do it.

Fast-forward fifty years and most of us will have stopped looking at the physical world and at each other.

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Talking of things that we still do anyway, about once a week I get a coffee on my way to work from Stumptown Coffee in the Ace Hotel on the corner of 29th Street and Broadway. This article gives a great portrait of the two economies at work in the neighborhood. One is that of cheap wholesale goods. “Rhinestones and ribbons” one storefront reads, and another, “Tiger Accessories”, which when I passed the other morning triggered an entertaining procession of accessorized tigers through my mind. The other is the world of hip, rich, international technoscenti, drawn by the Ace Hotel that opened in 2009. Stumptown Coffee epitomizes the latter. The coffee is roasted in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The servers are clad in hipster-meets-nineteen-forties attire. They wear chic shades of brown, accompanied by thick rimmed glasses and wide brimmed hats. In the mornings there is always a queue out the door and into the hotel lobby. The coffee is great but also pricey, like $4.50 for a latte. And yet still I go.