Tag Archives: New York City

September 17, 2021 · 10:15 am

It started out a good day

and wound up even better. At 7:30 am I stood on the Grand Concourse sidewalk petting Spartacus, a dog belonging to a neighborhood guy.

This massive animal, an Italian Mastiff (or Cane Corso) was a puppy at 150 pounds and destined to grow bigger. He was gentle as a kitten.

The afternoon progressed as usual, inspecting trees and their roots in trenches, munching plantain chips, drinking too much iced coffee.

Then we head to a concert at a place called Brooklyn Steel: Black Pumas, the psychedelic-rhythm and blues band whose smash Colors has had everyone entranced in the past year.

First, to eat. A Taste of Heaven pops up as right around the corner from the concert, in east Williamsburg.

You here for the venue? says Tony, who owns the place and is chief cook. Well, yes.

Jerk ribs, cabbage, collard greens from an aluminum dish with a plastic fork. From a steam table. A quart container of mango KoolAid to slake the thirst, because everything is popping with spice.

We dine outside, no indoor seating, at a tiny table. About the best grub I’ve had recently, and that includes a fancy restaurant high in the air where you had an extraordinary vision of verdant central park stretched out in front of you. The food, not so extraordinary. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve dined out someplace supposedly fantastic and said I could do better at home.

Not here. I can’t fathom how he turned out this food in his tiny kitchen, but it is magical.

We’re number one on Yelp, says Tony, leaving his station and setting another tin of jerk ribs down in front of us gratis so we can both try them. And, in fact, checking out Tony’s boast, A Taste of Heaven stands out on Yelp as number one out of 184 soul food restaurants in New York. Unfortunately they have no dessert, but an elderly lady sitting on the one chair inside pulls a yellow supermarket cake out of her plastic shopping bag and offers to give me a slice. She urges me to take it. It’s lemon! she says.

In case you want to find a Taste of Heaven, it stands at a crossroads.

Marked by the eternally ubiquitous sneakers that hang from a wire above the street.

A short drive takes us to find something sweet, through Brooklyn’s gentrified blocks with their clean sidewalks and glossy windows. Mature willows tower over young ginkgos..

A super-spare and clean gym open to the street.

Some great band names.

Entertaining murals. Note: you can’t see JFK’s face with the naked eye, only with the camera. A mystery how it’s done.

A chocolate cone is good on this end-of-summer evening, yet brings us up close to a ghost bike, one of the shrines you find all around town to bicyclists killed in traffic. Descansos, as they’re called in the Southwest, where the victims of highway accidents are sometimes memorialized by side-of-the-highway assemblages of car parts, in addition to photos and other sentimental items.

It gave me a frisson of PTSD since I recently had a bike wreck which left me banged up and bruised and slightly concussed. All better now.

The venue was jammed, the last of a four-night stint.

And the Black Pumas?

They rock. Almost as much as Tony’s jerk ribs.

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September 11, 2021 · 11:06 am

Not to be too grandiose,

but it’s as if the universe knows it’s the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 and presents us with a day that eerily resembles that day, the bluebell sky, the lovely cool of late summer, the feeling of peace and anticipation of all the good things fall will bring.

You know what comes next. And everyone has their 9/11 story, trotted out among friends and family for the occasion as if rubbing the old wound will heal it.

It’s the day before the anniversary, late afternoon, and we are on our way to an art opening on Manhattan’s southern tip, on South Street. The uneasy anticipation of the big day has begun to well up, along with excitement about the art show, which bills itself as the Independent Art Fair, and is to take place at Casa Cipriani, the swellegant restaurant we can’t ordinarily afford, situated on the upper floor of the Governor’s Island Ferry Terminal.

lThis show is where the up and comers hang their work. It’s a white hot market apparently for these comparatively juvenile artists, ones who haven’t made it yet to Upper East Side walls.

Driving down the West Side Highway toward 10 South Street, at South Ferry, we share tales of that day. How Gil and I went down to library park in Hastings, with its magnificent view of Manhattan Island, and watched the smoke plume from the towers before they fell. How I was on the phone with my father only a little later, both of us glued to the tv screen, when the first tower pancaked. Josefa’s husband was ill and she was rushing him to the hospital when she first heard about the tragedy on the car radio. A friend of ours who lived downtown abandoned her car on the FDR and ran toward the fire to pick up her kid at a preschool steps away from the flames. You have a 9/11 story too, don’t you?

So memories loom over the day before the anniversary, but can’t quell the sense that the city is coming back from its newest tragedy, the pandemic. Art as palliative.

We sit on the balcony of the Battery Maritime Building.

The Beaux-Arts building was built from 1906 to 1909 and designed by the firm Walker and Morris as the easternmost section of the partially completed Whitehall Street Ferry Terminal. It has backstage views of the Staten Island Ferry sign.

And various rushing roadways.

But you always feel the presence of another time, through design details it’s easy to overlook.

The reception is thronged with artists and patrons. If you must sit and eat dinner — and I am famished — it is delicious.

The art is relatively low-end in terms of an investment, ranging from 10 to 10,000 dollars, according to the knowledgable art dealer, Rick, who invited us. It’s quite a range.

I like some more than others.

As would anyone.

But it’s nothing to worry over, on this day before the anniversary of 9/11, a year and a half since Covid hit our city.

Humans. 

Cats.

Computer art. The toebone is connected to the ankle to the kneebone.

An homage to the early 20th century revolutionary revelatory Russian artist Malevich.

Textiles. I like that.

There is a shop at which you can buy an artist’s facsimile of her own notebooks for $25 apiece. Lee Lozano, look her up. Wow.

What a concept.

We wander among the rooms that used to be the ferry’s waiting area. You can still get transportation to Governor’s Island and Jersey City down below. People are boarding to go to Governor’s Island even now, at 7 pm on a Friday night.

Where we are, dealers are hustling, selling art.

I won’t buy any.

But it’s a kind of wonderful event, a way of marking the distance between then and now. Art flourishes, even in the wake of darkness.

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September 8, 2021 · 12:53 pm

Median Cool

A raised traffic median is just a long trough with soil in it. And, of course, plantings, and sometimes trees.

The City of New York has applied its hive mind to widening the street medians of the Grand Concourse, which is what brings me here – to inspect the existing trees that might be impacted by the street construction, and to check out the importation of shrubs etc. when it takes place later this fall, in the cool planting season.

So… why is this happening? We’re talking about a raised median, which is rare in NYC. Yes, there is the West Side Highway, which I was lucky enough to tour in a golf cart earlier this year when bidding for a job to maintain its vegetation.

There’s a strip of beautiful trees and roses in season dividing two lengths of highway, all with a phenomenal view of the Hudson River.

Every median holds 24 inches of soil above the roadbed, according to the Department of Transportation Street Design guidelines. Hard to imagine this collection of construction debris materializing into a cohesive bed of plants, but that’s the plan. And crews are hard at work making it happen.

It seems that the point is not only beautifying a thoroughfare but controlling the vehicles that use it. Lane narrowing, which comes about when more space is taken up by medians, has the effect of what the experts call “traffic calming.” Sometimes cities remove an entire lane, which is known as a “road diet.” In this case the road will still be wide, 2 lanes northbound and southbound and service lanes on either side as well.

There is a famous, old traffic median in this city, running the length of Park Avenue north of the Helmsley building, which straddles it. It might be worth visiting NYC just to drive through that twisty tunnel. The median’s tulips and begonia beds date to the 1950s.

The park narrowed over the years but I’ve always found it beautiful, and obviously diligently cared for.

Back in the day, traffic was a bit unwieldy in NYC, especially at the turn of the century, when horse carts jockeyed for space with street cars, pedestrians and even some automobiles.

Pictures from the turn of the 20th century  show traffic going every which way. It definitely needed some calming! Park Avenue, though, was a respite – it was actually a pedestrian park seated in the middle of a tamer Park Avenue.

People could stroll, sit, push prams, whatever, in safety. Now the powers that be are planning a remake for Park Avenue to become more like it once was.

Designs have been sketched.

I want to go there and be calm.

But I think that the Grand Concourse will be completed first.

We have trees. Lots of honey locust.

Some of the areas farther downtown have already been finished.

It’s hard to imagine the stretch of the road where I monitor trees botanically beautified. I can’t wait to see it.

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September 4, 2021 · 6:48 pm

Come for the oak trees,

stay for the polka dots.

That was my idea at the New York Botanical Garden, along with hundreds of other visitors still drying out after being pummeled by Ida.

Yayoi Kusama has been the artist in residence for months, transforming outdoor and indoor spaces, populating them with her whimsical works. Now 92 and one of the most prominent Japanese artists, she drew acclaim in the 60s for organizing happenings where the naked participants would be painted with polka dots.

This installation is a bit more tame, though it has plenty of dots.

Eschewing the rock garden, the stand of virgin forest and the rose garden – a sacrifice, with the later bloomers at their peak – we visited Kusama-world.

Some works can be found in the peerless Victorian greenhouse, designed by Lord & Burnham, the preeminent designer of glass houses in the U.S. in the nineteenth century,  in the Italian Renaissance style, which houses the Garden’s collection of tropical plants. You can find flourishing palms like this one from Brazil.

Or this quite remarkable phallic charmer, also hailing from South America.

Now Kusama can be found here as well, with a pumpkin sculpture. The Garden has cleverly included a quote from the artist with each work.

I parted a row of zinnias and reached in to pluck the pumpkin from its vine. It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner. It was still moist with dew, indescribably appealing, and tender to the touch.

Everything is saturated with color. Even the flower beds are intended to mimic her work. I am happy that I have painted flowers. There are no objects more interesting.

Step outside. The lily pool, like everything else horticulatural here, has been annotated for your edification.

Personally I think lilies can speak for themselves.

Especially in the late summer sunlight.

The koi in the pool could probably eat a man. Are they alive or did Kusama paint them?

A path leads to a little Kusama-designed hut. You are handed a sticker with an image of a poppy and are told to place it wherever in the room you like. A lot of people have obviously preceded us.

The whole “house” is awash with poppies. Some prefer to take their poppies home with them.

A memento of a day spent with Yayoi Kusama.

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August 20, 2021 · 2:12 pm

You can’t unsee the graffiti in the Bronx

once you see it. And it is all around you.

Some surfaces would seem to be left alone. Church walls, for example. Or cars. But everything else is fair game, and especially popular are store gates, the kind that get opened in the morning and pulled down at night.

Every surface is game.

You’ll find mailboxes.

Dumpsters.

Houses.

Even lightpoles.

Self expression. It’s such a powerful human urge.

A lot of these look as if they were spraypainted by the same person, but I’m sure I’m missing the subtleties.

I happen to like the metallic images.

The runic ones.

Indulge me. When I looked on the Grand Concoure in about a four block radius, I found so many striking examples.

And my favorite, I guess.

Washington Square Arch in the West Village has chronic problems with graffiti. It was tagged one night amongst general mayhem, and by the next morning they had removed the anti-cop slogans, leaving “ghost graffiti” that would only be finally removed from the porous, delicate stone  at a later date. 

In the Bronx, nothing gets removed.

You start to see color everywhere, even where it’s ungraffitied.

Utility markouts are  really a kind of graffit. You’ll notice them on every sidewalk. Yellow means gas. Don’t dig too near or you might get blown up. Red, electric.

Some fundamental graffiti history. A while back there was a huge warehouse called 5 Pointz in Queens – it was constructed in 1892 as a factory that built water meters — that served as the canvas for dozens of graffiti artists as well has leasing studios to artists inside.

We visited, and something amazing was that after a certain viewing period one artist would cover over the work of another artist with his own work. Just wipe it away. That was the accepted method of showing as much good stuff as could be shown. Very democratic.

I was wearing a cast on my foot at the time and I asked the artist named King Bee if he would tag it.

Fast forward and of course something so impossibly cool could not last. The owner of the structure announced that he was razing 5 Pointz to put up a residential complex, and all the artists would have to leave. He had the walls whitewashed overnight. Even a plea from Banksy could not save the brilliant assortment of aerosol art. The developer got payback – a judge made him pay 6.7 million in damages to 21 artists.

The Royal “King Bee,” born Alfredo Bennett the guy who decorated my cast, grew up in this part of the Bronx and honed his aerosol chops here, in fact.  His way of “giving back” was to furnish extravagant murals at 17-50 Grand Concourse and other Bronx locations. His oeuvre, which includes madly stinging bees, is something to admire. I like it better than the paintings of some of the genteel artists venerated by collectors and museums. George Seurat, for example, or Rubens.

There is a difference between the iconic murals of George Floyd – found now in cities including Houston, Philadelphia, Portland and Los Angeles, Miami Chicago as well as Minneapolis, and so often defaced  by white nationalists – and the personal idiom of the streets.

But they both require paint and skill – perhaps some just need a taller ladder.

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August 18, 2021 · 11:22 am

The scents of the Grand Concourse,

both pleasant and foul, follow me as I walk the avenue inspecting trees to make sure they’re not injured by the major construction project underway, alerting the contractor to tree pits that have had stuff dumped in them.

First is citrus heaven, as I go past the many small produce stands where the proprietor peels oranges on a spit, afterwards bagging them for the clientele. The aroma wafts out to the sidewalk, freshening the morning.

One not so lovely, the smell of the pet store. Canine poop and pee rise like a cloud in front of the shop.

Puppy mill puppies include that little Golden in the window,  and can cost 2,800 dollars in the case of this English bulldog.

Which I would love to bring home, but can’t afford. Plus I prefer pit bulls.

Speaking of pets, the bodega I patronize just acquired a kitten named Winston, who is kept in the bathroom but has perfumed the whole store already.

Hard hats do not usually patronize shops here, but I go in if I’m interested.

I enter a nail salon to use the facilities – they really seem like every other store in the Bronx, alternating with hair braiding places – and I’m hit with dense, choking smoke from the acrylic shaping that goes on here. The bathroom is sparkling clean, as is the case in every establishment run by women here.

A relief to pass by the other big presence, the laundromat, with its sudsy air emanating from the open doors. 

The trees themselves offer a green breeze, especially if you harvest a few to determine the species – some sort of elm, as yet to be determined, with a problem as evidenced by the pin pricks.

And at the fish store, where the fish seem to have just swam in from the sea, the tangy salt breeze begs me to take home a salmon, bluefish, anything but the shark, a species which is now being overfished. In the morning they take them out of boxes of ice and line them up in an orderly fashion for choosy shoppers.

Or you can go to the cuchifritos restaurant, a hole in the wall that doesn’t even have a name in the window. The smell of the best fried pork in the neighborhood draws long lines, and when I wait I have the most delicious pina colada I’ve ever drunk.

It’s the only eatery I’ve ever patronized with a Lotto booth. Well used, too.

And finally, the garlic that hits my nose when I rip open the tostones package, its contents rich with grease and salt. Every day I promise myself I won’t indulge, a promise inevitably broken.

It’s an aromatic distinction of the Grand Concourse, one of so many. I’m going to get a bag of Tostones right now.

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August 16, 2021 · 6:35 pm

More spooky doings

in the Bronx. A fresh length of topsoil is laid down in one of the new medians at 175 Street on the Grand Concourse. This will bring shrubbery and trees in all shapes and sizes to the neighborhood. It will, we hope, transform the lives of people here in some organic way.

Meanwhile, I happen to look up, and floating above, grey against the grey sky, is the cupola of what I am to find is a derelict church over one hundred years old.

It is all locked up so I can’t get in to see it. A fellow inspector tells me that homeless individuals had holed up in part of the building, until they were finally evicted, after years of effort.

The church was built in 1910, by Christ Congregational Church of Mount Hope, of Georgian-style red brick and white trim. Spacious and handsome, it was designed by  Hoppin & Koen of New York City, the same architectural firm that created the Albany County Courthouse and other distinguished structures. In the center of the building, the sanctuary has a domed roof of tin, painted green, and an entrance framed by a portico with four columns. I can vaguely see them behind the chain link fence. Above the portico is the square tower that is still visible, and which once held up a tiered steeple.


For decades the church had a large and worshipful congregation. There is an auditorium that can hold almost 400 people, as well as a gymnasium and meeting rooms. Recently it was owned by the Pilgrim United Church of Christ.

When things fell apart, paint and plaster peeling—supposedly because various pastors let the structure go to ruin – this was the result. It carries myriad Department of Buildings violations.

Its magnificent organ was silenced.  Made by M.P. Möller, in Hagerstown, Md. in 1914, it had a deluxe tubular-pneumatic action. It was tested in 2012 and found to be ruined.

Various residents of the neighborhood have fought so that the church would not be razed and turned into a proposed homeless shelter. The local Community Board sees potential for the building as a cultural venue for the Mount Hope locale. 1,000 people signed a petition. A determined few congregants still huddle in a side room to pray. Outside the locked gates, I meet a couple of young men who would probably be candidates for that shelter – they were standing, shuffling, seemingly waiting for someone. They inform me that the current Dominican Pastor is a fraud – they had in fact been living on the first floor and he evicted them and he doesn’t even own the 

building, they gripe. They don’t mention ghosts, but I am sure there are plenty around in the cavernous church.

They leave and the pastor arrives in his shiny red  SUV. Unlocks the gates, backs his car inside.

That must be Reverand Israel Martinez, he of the Iglesia Evangelica Los Peregrinos.

Maybe someone will succeed in saving this sad, crumbling architectural once-gem. In addition to new plantings and trees outside, the people who live in the neighborhood, could use a beautiful place to go, and to pray if that makes sense for them. It could be as beautiful as the new trees on the medians.

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August 10, 2021 · 4:07 pm

New York Trashy

Should be the nickname of this small piece of the Bronx. You can’t escape the litter.

Maybe there just aren’t enough appropriate receptacles?

Someone carefully put her half-full cup on the ground. I don’t like Dunkin iced coffee either, but I don’t leave it just hanging out there.

There are guardians of the clean everywhere if you look for them.

Every day I walk past Darion hosing down the sidewalk in front of the defunct Paradise Theater.

His job is to keep the place clean, “and it’s big!,” he told me. It sure is — in its heyday it was one of the biggest in the city, if not in the country. Some of the other shopkeepers water their sidewalks, too – I like that as it cleans the soles of my workboots when I walk by.

Others use a ubiquitous small broom and dustpan to get the litter.

Tidy.

The proprietor of a juice bar told me, “You have to keep it clean. It’s better for business.” I will go in to get a green smoothie today.

First thing in the morning, 7am, they are out creating order out of chaos.

Discarded masks lay around everywhere.

What happened? Did someone just get tired of wearing it and fling it to the ground? Three quarters of the residents here wear masks inside and out, everybody, old and young. I don’t know whether this means they haven’t got the vax or that they got it and they’re protective anyway.

I engaged a sanitation bigwig in a starched forest-green uniform and badge and a driver in her streetcleaning vehicle about the trash. Number one, he intoned, there are three types of trash – homeowners, shops, and garbage on the ground (duh).  It’s much worse, he said, since Covid. Alternate side of the street parking was suspended, which I took to mean that it was hard for garbage workers to get through the cars to get the bags. He said that when they have the resources the City makes inroads with the sidewalk trash. And oh yes, he said, noting my hard hat and reflective vest, the contractors working here are responsible for much of the garbage. What else should he say when I asked him why there was so much garbage lying around. He did not wish to have his photo taken, nor did she.

I don’t think this bench/table is trash, it was simply left in front of the supermarket overnight and serves some purpose.

There are clean shiny things in the neighborhood. Scooters and sanitation vehicles.

Sometimes you have a jarringly deep glimpse of a person’s life.

What happened to this individual and how did so many important documents end up scattered on the Grand Concourse? There is a story there.

Sometimes it’s a glimpse you don’t want, like a used Q-tip.

Tree pits grow yuck as well as trees.

There I draw the line. Each tree should enjoy a pristine growing environment. Although I’m biased, of course.

And I haven’t even gotten to New York Shitty. All the kindly sweepers and washers couldn’t banish what the dogs leave behind.

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August 9, 2021 · 12:32 pm

The beauty of street trees

is the subject of Matthew Lopez Jensen’s Tree Love: Street Trees and Stewardship in New York City, https://www.terrain.org/2021/unsprawl/tree-love-new-york-city/. I highly recommend the article’s beautiful photos and elegant prose.

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August 7, 2021 · 8:43 pm

If you go to the High Line

don’t expect to have it to yourself. Once upon a time if you happened to be passing through Chelsea you could wander up to the one and a half mile long park and the sensation would be one of openness, a respite from the claustrophobia that comes with living in a city with 8 million people. Now you need a timed pass to gain entry.

The guy in the Willie Wonka hat gave us a break though, letting us by like a couple of celebrities.

What first inspired a coalition of people to create the High Line–once the railway for provisions headed to lower Manhattan and making its way directly through some buildings as it went–was the realization that the railbed had become host to a veritable meadow in its years of disuse.

It also hosted junkies and hookers, needles and condoms, but the coalition was made up of visionaries. This part of town had had many lives. In earlier years, the 1920s, a different train had gone down 9th Avenue proper, killing so many pedestrians that cowboys were called in to warn people away from the tracks, waving red bandanas as a visual aid. For a time the area was known as Death Avenue.

Once the tracks were elevated, transit of foodstuffs was assured. Meat, especially, came down to Gansevoort street and the warren of warehouses that made up the meat market. The trains stopped running with the rise of trucking, ending in the ‘80s. When I first lived in New York during that decade I remember seeing beef carcasses hung in open bays and cobblestones slick with blood and lard.

There is little residue of that time today, though the rails remain.

The gardening team has created a gem that changes with the seasons.

Today, purple coneflowers dominated. The rails show through.

Since the High Line opened in 2009, the birches have grown up.

And some trees you wouldn’t imagine would flourish, like this big leaf magnolia.

Art is everywhere.

Though sometimes you have  to seek it out.

But what also has grown is the throng of new buildings that crowd the park on every side.

Some apartments are so close that you feel like a snoop just walking along.

In fact, when I first started going to the High Line it was rather famous for a glass building that housed sexual exhibitionists.

Many views are blocked, though you can still look straight down 23rd street, and if you happen to be in the right spot you can see the Hudson.

But the main thing you see is people.

It is a babble of foreign languages, with the High Line featured in guide books all over the world.

And everyone is marching along, phones held aloft for pictures (me included, obviously). It’s a place that is quintessentially urban, a crowd scene – but isn’t that why we visit New York City?

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August 3, 2021 · 7:00 pm

Even at seven a.m.

you could tell something was going on. The tiny park across the street on the Grand Concourse had been miraculously covered in clean mulch overnight, its tree pits and the ground all around and under the benches dark brown and shredded, all new.

The sign announcing the name of the park, the Bergen Triangle, is almost as large as the park itself.

Two Parks employees wielded leaf blowers to chase away stray shreds. Then blue tents marked NYPD went up along one side. A cop brought over a metal barricade to divert traffic from the Concourse side road. Cars parked inconveniently found themselves towed.

Sanitation vehicles, street sweepers, began to circle the triangle – three, four times. Someone wanted this area to be spic and span.

This park is usually distinguished not by cleanliness but by its canopy.

People settle in there to talk, play music, sometimes rap with a  speaker, and feed the pigeons – hence the thick coating of bird droppings on the sidewalk, something hard to avoid as I’m walking up the avenue to the work site. Some of the park sitters are lunatics, but most sit calmly enjoying the shade, which is what much of the Concourse lacks.

Recent studies have revealed the immense importance of shade on both health and mood.  When urban areas lack tree canopy people suffer.

I smelled a visit from a dignitary in all this tarting up activity. The Governor? the Mayor? Lady Gaga? I figured the action would be coming from the direction of the 94thPrecinct stationhouse a block away on 181 Street.

The Bergen Triangle originated when New York City acquired the land “for street purposes by condemnation” according to the web site of New York City Parks and Recreation. After Anthony Avenue was completed, the Department of Highways and Transportation turned the leftover lands to Parks in 1932. Parks created the bluestone-curbed, cement sidewalked, turn-of-the-century-style benches with shrubbery and pin oaks. These are the type of benches that Robert Moses favored.

Note: there are a few pin oaks still but honey locusts dominate as always in this neighborhood (the kind mercifully without thorns).

The park’s name came from William “Billy” C. Bergen (1862-1925), a one-time policeman known as the “millionaire cop” because he made a fortune developing empty lots in the Bronx at the beginning of the 20th century after starting a career as a beat cop. Walking his beat, Bergen couldn’t help  but notice large land lots as yet undisturbed by the new subway lines just coming through. When the Third Avenue El and the Jerome Avenue El opened, bringing people and industry, Bergen bought and sold with gusto, eventually becoming a developer and builder and finally a mover and shaker in Democratic politics. A small number of his houses still stand in the Bronx.

Millionaire Cop

Bergen Triangle is bounded by Anthony Avenue (the aforementioned street with the empty land — hard to imagine now), Grand Concourse and East 181 St.

Sirens start to sound. Is it starting? No, that’s just an ambulance wailing as usual.

Friendly cops congregate all around the park.

A temporary bandstand appears, hammered together by Parks workers.

At 4:00, “National Night Out Against Crime” will start – in over seventy locations!—with the purpose of improving police-community relations. One officer tells me the Mayor will indeed “stop by.” Stop by? “Alright, he’ll speak.” There are to be barbecue, face painting, musical acts. And, probably thinking there is clean mulch in the Bergen Triangle every day, the Mayor.

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August 2, 2021 · 4:26 pm

Is there a creepy feeling in the air

or is it just me? I’m standing on the sidewalk, looking up at a block-long office building with its name prominently displayed across the front: POE BUILDING. It seems incongruous now, but makes sense when you consider when the building when up, in 1917. The Grand Concourse had just been laid, and the people of New York were going all out to venerate Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe spent a lot of time in the Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx, but only after hopping around from one residence to another in New York City and elsewhere.

Born in Boston in 1809, he first came to Manhattan with his wife Virginia and his mother-in-law Maria, and stayed for a few months in the West Village. They moved to Philadelphia. They returned in 1844, living in a boarding house downtown before moving to a farmhouse owned by the Brennan family, in the vicinity of what today is West 84 Street and Broadway.

Over the years he published not only Gothic poetry but short stories and criticism. He was a central figure in the movement known as Romanticism. Some of his stories (The Tell-tale Heart is an especially creepy one I like) were gold. Supernatural and detective fiction were his specialties.

Poe was apparently the first well-known literary figure to try to support himself off his writing, and it’s unclear whether he made a good job of it. He had no children – perhaps a lack of funds is why. His checkered life included marriage to his 13-year-old first cousin Virginia and an ill-fated military career, failing as a cadet at West Point.

The Raven, an overnight success, was written at the Brennan Farmhouse, and The Evening Mirror, where Poe worked as a critic, was good enough to publish it. The newspaper’s headquarters at 26 Ann Street still have a plaque devoted to Poe (though apparently you can’t get in to see it), as do seemingly all the other nooks and crannies he made his own over the years. The site of Brennan Farmhouse got a plaque, too, when it was razed in 1922.

After yet again moving to Greenwich Village, Poe leased a small cottage in the Fordham section of what was then Westchester County, from the Valentine family. The rent was $100 a year. It was the spring of 1847.

In large part Poe moved there because of Virginia’s illness, tuberculosis – it was thought that the fresh country air would banish it. However, the same year they moved in, she died, and two years later 40-year-old Poe himself was to die, raving on the streets of Baltimore, whether because of disease, substance abuse, alcohol, suicide, syphilis, or existential. The cause has never come clear.

Fast forward a few years, after Virginia’s mother Maria desperately tried to sell off the house’s furnishings (Virginia’s death bed remains).  Literary-minded folks tried to save the cottage, and succeeded in 1913 when the house was moved to a new location, a newly created park with the great writer’s name.

It became a New York City landmark in 1966, standing at 2640 Grand Concourse at East Kingsbridge Road – just down the way from POE BUILDING at 2432, which went up in 1917 when the city was in the grip of Poe-mania.

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July 16, 2021 · 6:35 pm

What on earth?

Actually, not earth at all, but the Hudson River at Pier 55, now a surreal topography of walkways, views, plantings and trees.

After Superstorm Sandy, Barry Diller decided he might as well plunk some of his millions into creating this new park, named Little Island. Two hundred sixty million dollars. Would it be boon or a billionaire’s boondoggle, we often wondered as we drove past the construction site just off the West Side Highway. It took four years to plan and three to build this 2.4 acre park with its 132 tulip-pot modules, each one of them unique in form. The park itself is a perfect square. It has just opened to the public, right as the population is exploding with post-Covid energy, vitality, euphoria.

As any place in New York, the people are the real attraction.

But I marveled at the landscape, created by Signe Nielsen at MNCA. I saw an interview with her in which she discussed the five different soil types that were used, and how the engineers had to face off against the gardeners to make sure that none of the tulips would drop into the drink.

Soil is heavy. Plantings carry weight too

Heavier still: trees. And this is the most remarkable thing about Little Island, the sheer number of mature trees planted by crane all over the park. This dawn redwood would be at home in an arboretum.

The root balls were huge. The trees are anchored by 4-10 steel straps, guy wires, atop the root balls, where they can’t be seen by passersby. It all looks impossibly natural and easy but is terrifically engineered. There are 114 trees, 35 species, from kousa dogwood to cedars of Lebanon, including 19 of what the planners are calling “hero trees”—the mammoth specimens. All of them ranged from 10-12 DBH at planting and were in the neighborhood of 30-40 years old. Diller has said something to the effect of he hopes Little Island will last forever, and with the sprinkler systems and hand watering going on behind the scenes, the landscaping just might survive through the next hurricane, as they hope.

The trees were glossy, healthy.

It looked like they’d always been there. It reminded me of Central Park, totally contrived in the nineteenth century to look totally natural. Little Island reminds us that at times contrivance can be fun.

But back to the people. As Gil’s mother would marvel when she visited the City, “The people! The people!”

There were guides on call in case you had a question. Meet Saul and Turow.

Polka dots.

Puppies.

Music.

I don’t know if anybody really noticed the girth of the trees around them, they were so engrossed in the views – all the way down to Lady Liberty. Or New Jersey, in this slightly more mundane view.

Welcome.

And if you need a breather and a snack, there are those too. I’ll try one next time I go.

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July 10, 2021 · 5:18 pm

You couldn’t tell if it was little-leaf

or not, the canopy was so far overhead. Tilia Americana or Tilia cordata? I stood in the Bronx next to a playground on on Gouveneur Avenue, marveling at the height of these monster lindens. The smallest of them had a DBH of 7 inches while the largest ran to 40 DBH. (DBH equals Diameter at Breast Height, the standard way of measuring trees’ height.) How tall were they? I could make out the heart-shaped leaves, all slightly asymmetrical, and the bracts that always remind me of pieces of cream-colored silk woven in someone’s hair. They carry the linden’s fruit so it will reproduce. But they must have been 40 feet tall. I am notoriously bad at heights, heights of trees, and just multiply my own height (generally) with how far up the tallest branches seem to be. I know there is a trigonometric formula I can invoke, but as I said I am bad at heights. (h=TanA x d)

People don’t normally think of New York when they think of shade. But it’s all around, chilling out people and homes and schools, in a fortunate neighborhood. Two men came by and spoke to be as I was juggling paper, pen and DBH tape for a survey of the linden trees on this block. A milling machine was going to come through soon, before the street was repaved, and the contractor wanted to prune any trees whose branches would get in the way of his 14 foot unit. I was to identify those trees in need of pruning. The two guys lived there, in an apartment underneath the mesh of branches and leaves far above. One said the tree we stood beside had “been there since before I was born”. He was about 60. The other said, “These trees shade everything, they make it all so cool, it’s so nice.” He was nice, too.

I had seen lindens pruned to within an inch of their lives and they could look beautiful like that.

Two allees of little-leaf lindens stand in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There has been a lot of study recently about the importance of shade in cities. Health suffers without trees there. The difference between shaded and nonshaded areas is something like ten degrees, enough to kill someone in southern climes without air conditioning, which not everyone can afford. This falls under the general rubric of environmental justice.

The canopies of these giant lindens on Gouveneur Avenue offered a generous helping of something little else could provide – coolness on a hot day. With the health changes come changes in mood, also. Maybe that’s why these guys were smiling so much. It’s a womb of cool. Shade that helps you live. I always thought that lindens were beautiful. On Gouveneur Avenue I realized they were life-giving as well.

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June 20, 2021 · 4:36 pm

Kissing and strolling

once went hand in hand on Manhattan, especially on bridges. For a long time iIt was even considered especially good manners for a gentleman to kiss a lady while on a bridge. (“What happened on the bridge stays on the bridge”)

Reverend Mr. Burnaby, quoted in New York’s Morning Chronicle on April 19, 1803, said, “it is the etiquette for every gentleman in company with a lady to salute his fair companion when upon it.”

There were multiple Kissing Bridges because there were dozens of springs and brooks all over Manhattan that people and coaches and horses and carts had to cross.

At one point in our city’s history, ladies could expect to fetch up a kiss at the bridge at 32nd Street just west of Fifth Avenue,at 33rd Street and Lexington Avenue over Kip’s Run, 54th Street and First Avenue, and 50th Street and Second Avenue.

The custom stretched back before the American Revolution judging by an advertisement in the Weekly Museum in 1797, looking for a tenant for the season of a 10-acre lot “through which the Kissing bridge brook runs.”

The well-researched Hidden Waters of New York City, by Sergei Kadinsky, tells us that in an earlier century, even, kissing bridges were common, over bodies of water that had names like Old Wreck Book, Sunfish Pond and De Voor’s Mill Stream.

Does anyone else have a “comfort century” the way people now keep “comfort animals”? Mine would be the seventeen century.

I think you can tell how verdant and stream-flushed Manhattan might have been in those days if you look at what’s called The Castello Plan, a famous copy of the first street map of the island, drawn in 1660. As the city grew more developed, it seemed, kissing on bridges grew less important. Perhaps with more buildings, people found more private places to smooch.

Let’s think. What bridges are there now in and around Manhattan? You can visit the many bow bridges of Central Park, over one hundred, every one of which was designed by Calvert Vaux. Walkers throng the Brooklyn Bridge, which the last time I was there seemed weighed down by the padlocks that were hung as amorous tributes, with the key thrown into the drink a gesture toward the infinity of the couple’s love, but since cut off by the City). There’s Brooklyn, George Washington, and more, and a little farther up out of town, where I live, the Tap. Each of these could be repurposed as a kissing bridge, if we only had the romantic will.

Let’s try.

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