New York missive no 104 - Pear tree

A while ago I was sitting on the sofa in our living room as dusk was falling. JNH was on my knee having his early evening bottle of milk (still a comforting routine for him – actually for both of us - even though he probably ‘should’ have outgrown it by now, to use the parlance of parenting advice).

There’s a pear tree outside our window, as I’ve mentioned before. As our apartment is on the third floor we are about at the bushiest part of the tree. While we sat on the sofa its leaves and branches were just distinguishable still: black lines against the deepening gray. Then I saw a dark hunched shape in the thick of them. I strained my eyes to make the shape out more clearly, to be sure it was what I thought it was. “Big bird,” I whispered to JNH. It was a city hawk, but in the midst of the blurry branches and night it was both there and not there.

JNH stopped drinking and we crept up closer to the window. It was definitely a hawk. For just a few moments we stood staring, neither we nor hawk moved. Then it launched off its branch and glided silently down the street. It flew in an absolutely straight line parallel to the houses, above the middle of the road. “See? Big, bird?” whispered JNH.

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The pear tree stands out on the block for its symmetrical shape and the fact it always appears tougher than others. Each year it’s the first tree around to bud, then to blossom (a white blizzard) and then develop its dense summer leaves. It keeps its leaves a long time, to the extent that when we first moved in I thought it was an evergreen, delaying a startling orange send-off before discarding them for winter. Despite its sturdy shape though, its individual branches are long and thin.

When viewed alone each one seems fragile as it reaches up, jostling with others. In strong winds I imagine that a small creature clinging to one of those branches would feel like being on a raft in the middle of the ocean in a storm. The branches give wide lurches like rolling waves and make sudden changes of direction. Most small creatures, I hope, would find a more secure shelter.

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If you’re on the balcony you can stretch over, just, and touch a leaf. The tree is close but not crowdedly so. Back in the living room, there is an element of being in a tree house but with more respectful distance. The windows face almost South. As the sun sets (over the far side of the East River, which is just to the West of us) the tree juggles with its rays and throws light-balls onto the shadows of the living room wall.

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There. Have I purged myself of references to that pear tree? I doubt it.

Of course ours isn't the only pear tree in NYC. I came across these great pics of some of the others.

New York missive no 103 - Individuals & cities, psychogeography, an orange digger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York missive no 102 - Second wedding anniversary

This time two years ago was C's and my wedding day. Like today it was a cold day with a bright, clear blue sky. Then, there was still snow on the ground from the previous week.

The pussy willows sold along 28th Street at this time of year always remind me of the wedding. Four big pots of them decorated the venue - a fabulous wedding contribution from sister P.

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?