"No matter how long it will last ...

Walking always clears the head, and however often you retrace your steps you'll find something new in the landscape. I don't mean the bigger changes, like a new store, or a gap where a building used to be. I mean the smaller ones, slight as a bird's footprints in the snow.

Perhaps you'll look in a different direction up or down, or through a gate normally closed left ajar, and spy something you've missed in all the other times you've gone by. A sign, a view down a passageway, a graffiti tag or some artfully self-righteous wheat pasted credo.  I'm not what you'd call a paster fan, but even their earnest or ironic phrases signify a small part of the streetscape history. Small markers are endless. Phrases and barely glimpsed sightlines slide into view, flicker, disappear.

I don't know why I collect these kinds of things.  It may well be the sign of a trivial mind.  Still,  I like extending their ordinary lifespans.  They'll stay a little longer.

When they accumulate, on a day like today, they subvert meaning altogether. A tiny Toys in Trouble pseudo bathroom sign barely glanced across your consciousness. Fair enough.

Minutes later, I walked by a warehouse where a couple of workers were scratching their heads at a sign that was recently pasted where they worked.  They looked at it - it made no sense to them at all, and why would anyone have put it on their building?

On familiar ground, I passed by the sanitation garage, right by the entrance where there are a bunch of chairs for outdoor lunch breaks. Maybe I never looked inside at the right angle before.

The more you look the more you'll find  a whole archaeology of purpose here.

I don't know who felt Second needed the words of Caio Fernando Abreu but I'll enjoy their brief stay.

... it is infinite now."

Breakdown

The New Arrival on Fourth

The long vacant store at Fourth & 10th has a new tenant.

While we always like bagels, the Shelsky's prices are considerably higher than, say, local stalwart Bagel Hole, which has always placed among the top city bagel stores.  A lox & cream cheese at the Bagel Hole is $6.95, while a Shelsky's number comes in at a hefty $11.50.  Of course, Shelsky's has a higher-end bagel niche, and a broader range of smoked fish, but there's a lot to be said for a still high-quality, broader appeal product, that includes a compact, highly-rated bagel, and a side-line in bialys. No airs, no toasted bagels at the Hole. More than a schmear of well-earned pride. Shelsy's aims for a gourmet platter, but I'd prefer an Everyman version on Fourth.  I used to have a far-fetched dream of a Bagel Hole outpost occupying one of those subway station stores, but they're still vacant, long after their updated occupancy deadline.  We're not expecting much there soon, with even the station platform renovation stalled.

With Starbucks across the street, we know the way the avenue is trending.

The new facade

at the Casa de Monos?

Tuesday

Aid to Puerto Rico

From UPROSE, suggestions for donations for aid to Puerto Rico:

DONATIONS

We are asking that you please make donations in a just and responsible way. The following are local environmental justice organizations based in Puerto Rico that are working at a grassroots level:

WhyHunger
Güakiá Colectivo Agroecológico
La Corporación Piñones Se Integra (COPI)
Proyecto Agroecológico El Josco Bravo
Or you can donate on UPROSE donation page and add the memo Por Nuestra Gente: Puerto Rico and we will direct it to a grassroots organization there. 

Critical supplies needed by grassroots organizations on the ground:

Soil
Non-GMO seeds
Water filters
Heavy-duty rubber gloves
Face masks
Bike repair kits

If you are able to donate please contact info@uprose.org for details or call 718-492-9307

The Metals

I kept forgetting to take a picture of the folks at Meineke on Fourth.  A decade ago it was just Mr. & Mrs. there but four years later there they were, a family, with three cute kids and a dog.

2012

By 2013 the family situation got ambiguous.  There was another woman in the picture and two more kids.  Had Grandma moved in to help her daughter, or had Wife no. two arrived?  We couldn't be sure. The following year another man appeared, standing at the curb and waving to passers-by.  A year later, another child and by 2016 a second dog.  This is one busy household.

2017

Sunday

Liberty

"Liberty relies upon itself, invites no-one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement ..."  ( Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass, 1855)

A Bit of Pazazz

I was walking up 13th when I ran into Ramon, who was standing admiring his freshly painted handiwork.  I'm a sucker for gold, and these newel posts have got a real sparkle now.  He's going to be painting the railings and posts of a neighboring stoop too - the look has evidently caught on. 

At some point in the last year or two, someone gave a worn-looking firebox at Sixth & 44th that golden touch too.

And on 23rd Street, another firebox was recently adopted as a renovation project, with detailing in blue and white.

The smallest details matter!  These rebel jolts of color light up the the space around them. Why not ? 

13th Avenue

Lords of the Schoolyard

Ed Hamilton, author of  Legends of the Chelsea Hotel and The Chintz Age, and longtime Chelsea Hotel resident, will be reading from his debut novel, Lords of the Schoolyard, at LES Bluestockings Books and Cafe  (172 Allen Street) this Friday, at 7:00 p.m.  He'll also be reading at Williamsburg bookstore Quimby's on October 12th  at 7:00 pm (536 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn).  Both events are free.

Lords of the Schoolyard is an unflinching depiction of bullying in Suburban America as seen through the eyes of the bullies themselves.

... There are very few books written from the point of view of the bullies themselves.  Why should we care?  Well, Tommy and Johnny, the narrators in Lords of the Schoolyard, are just kids too, after all, and they are capable of becoming decent adults.  What’s more, some of them, perhaps unrepentant, do manage to get into positions of power when they grow up (in fact, we seem to have one in the White House at the moment), so it makes sense to try to understand where they are coming from.   

You can see a trailer for the novel here.

Lost & Found

I got a little lost in the cemetery, and did the rounds of Cypress & Atlantic twice. Back at The Catacombs a blonde in a short black dress & heels appeared.  She could have been there for a funeral, I guess, but there was no air of mourning about her.  She looked like a good-time girl, heading for something exclusive and forbidden in a vault. I asked for directions, but she said she had no idea where she was.  She looked us up on GPS though, and this was enough to send me on my way.

I was in the right direction now, and soon enough I was walking Landscape Avenue, overlooking Sylvan Water.  I did a little detour to get closer.  From above, the mausoleums ringed around the water looked like glorified British beach huts. They summoned up wet bathing suits, goose-pimpled limbs, and towels gritty with sand.  The weather was better here of course, and the views were lovely, but I couldn't imagine even this deluxe location as a final resting space. No, it'll be a scattering for me, and I'm not fussed where, as long as it's not a cemetery. I've joked about locations with the family, but for some reason they're not amused.

A brace of hounds was lazing in the sun, listening to end-of-the-season block-party music drifting from across the lake. I sat between them for a while, then took the Margin Path that skirts Fifth.  The iron railings separate you (just) from life on the other side - a kid on a skateboard, aiming for cool, but stumbling and missing the mark, a father and baby and mylar balloon, and the source of the music, still unseen but getting closer.  How exotic and appealing the ordinary world appeared from here; how sweet a relief to get to the gates at last and slip right back inside it..

By Water, by Land

Childish Canal Month is drawing to a close.  Given that it was inspired by visions of earnest canoeists on the Gowanus at sunrise, reciting extracts from The Waves as they paddled the canal's oily waters, I thought I should see if canals actually appear much in the Woolf canon.

I could find very little mention of them, and what I did find was second-hand and incidental. In "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown", Woolf's famous essay comparing Edwardian novelists to the more creative Georgians, she decries "materialist" Edwardians like Arnold Bennett, who look, but do not perceive. She quotes a passage from Bennett's Hilda Lessways as an example of laborious drudgery without "one line of insight".

The bailiwick of Turnbull lay behind her; and all the murky district of the Five Towns, of which Turnbull is the northern outpost, lay to the south.  At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal wound in large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the sea.  On the canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda's window, was a flour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as much smoke as the kilns and the chimneys closing the prospect on either hand.  From the flour-mill a bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new cottages from their appurtenant gardens, led straight into Lessway Street, in front of Mrs. Lessway's House. By this path Mr. Skellhorn should have arrived.

More remotely yet, we turn to Leonard.  In Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, Viviane Forrester examines his only description of the couple's honeymoon.  It makes no mention of Virginia, but is vivid in breakfast details:

At 7:30 in the morning I staggered up on to the deck and found the Third Officer who spoke English... He took me up on to the bridge, and had breakfast sent to me there; the first course was an enormous gherkin, swimming in oil and vinegar.  One of the bravest things I have ever done, I think, was to eat this, followed by two fried eggs and bacon, coffee and rolls, with the boat, the sea, and the coast of France going up and down all around me."

And later:

"Then there are three lines about Venice, but only about the weather, describing the wind 'whistling through its canals, (the wind on the Grand Canal) can sometimes seem the coldest wind in Europe.'"

If I'm wandering Gowanus, or any farther stretch of the city or beyond, it's as a walker that Woolf provides inspiration.  Rebecca Solnit, a contemporary walker and essayist non-pareil, understands Woolf, and the liberty of shutting the front door behind you and heading to the street, with perfection.

Public space, urban space, which serves at other times the purposes of the citizen, the member of society establishing contact with other members, is here the space in which to disappear from the bonds and binds of individual identity. Woolf is celebrating getting lost, not literally lost as in not knowing how to find your way, but lost as in open to the unknown, and the way that physical space can provide psychic space. She writes about daydreaming, or perhaps evening dreaming in this case, the business of imagining yourself in another place, as another person.
                                                                           

The Staple

Lunch at Squires diner, in Lower Manhattan's Southbridge Towers housing complex, is an altogether happy experience.  Squires hasn't got what you'd call period charm by way of looks, but the customers are old New York in spades.  Old literally too. Here in a booth, working on my toasted bagel and my bowl of minestrone, I'm almost young again!  Longtime retirees predominate here, though there's a fair sprinkling of middle-aged-and-under types too.  The service is brisk and friendly, and something about the place gives you a sense of utter relaxation. Here's the city we thought we'd gone and lost.

I guess you wouldn't call Southbridge pretty, but I like its boxy construction and succession of courtyards.  Architecturally, it reminds me of British public buildings of the period, so maybe that's why I find it so appealing.  With a diner and a supermarket right on site, I could get old here too.  But Mitchell-Lama Southbridge Towers went market-rate three years ago; today a three-bedroom will cost you close to two million.  Today's middle-class must look farther afield.  Squires is worth a trip though.  A solid choice in a priced-out city.

That swing set playgroundette looks like the same vintage as the buildings.

Collected by Monk Parakeets

Among Trees and Stones, an exhibition by Matthew Jensen.

Make your way to the Gate House at the (Green-Wood) cemetery’s entrance on Fort Hamilton Parkway where Jensen has assembled a room-sized cabinet of curiosities drawing from specimens and photographs he has amassed in his many walks through the cemetery, as well as from Green-Wood’s rarely seen collection of fine art and historic objects. The installation continues into a peaked attic space never before open to the public.

The exhibition runs through November 26.

Hurricane Relief

Here are locations where you can donate supplies to help Puerto Rico.  The text for the Red Hook Library information is indistinct here; the items requested for drop-off are toiletries, canned food, batteries, flashlights, women's hygiene products, water filters, baby formula, diapers, water, underwear & socks.  For more details, call the library at 718-935-0203
.

I Walk Therefore

Earlier this month, the walking pace picked up speed.  The season had changed (it seemed) ; it was nice to swing back into the brisk, everyday stride of fall, winter, spring motion.  Life was quick with purpose. And then a day or two of heat set me back again: once more the lazy saunter and the fat slap, slap, slap of sandal hitting sidewalk.  Purpose?  Who was I kidding?

I like it when the body sets the pace, and you just fall in line.

The body likes to strike poses. Nothing dramatic here, just its own childish refusal to stand up straight. An arm taut, a palm flat against a lamp-post while it waits to cross a street, the angle a back measures as it leans against a subway station wall.  A leg crossed, a foot resting on its toes.  The fool  - does it really think it's still a teenager?  While walking, too, it rolls up sleeves and pushes hands in pockets.  It's not laziness or sullen disregard here - it's simply disappointed by pedestrian gait.  I humor it always.

North of the Hamilton Bridge

Gowanus Canal north of Hamilton Ave. bridge. At the right are cement mills with bargeloads of crushed limestone from quarries up the Hudson River.  Ewing Galloway. About 1930.

Green-Wood