New York City

Central Park

Posted on by Laughingnomad

In any given week in the summer you can choose from any four or five street fairs and on this day we chose the Columbus Street Fair on the Upper West Side of Central Park. Stall after stall for blocks offered food, drink and interesting items to purchase…we bought two small narrow Japanese cups which we hoped would keep our coffee warmer in the morning.

Then we turned west…past The Dakota, John Lennon’s apartment where he was murdered, to Central Park where on any given day people come to this 843-acre park for sheer recreational pleasure…full of roller-bladers, skaters, bicyclers, runners, picnicers, softball players, frisbee throwers, concert goers and people-watchers.

We walked past Strawberry Fields, the three-acre landscaape dedicated to the memory of John Lennon that is planted with specimans from more than 100 nations and where Bob took a picture of the plaque “Imagine,” set into the walkway that commemorates my most favorite song in all the world. Further on we watched colorful figures artfully roller-blading to thudding electronic music.

We headed back to the subway through the Sheep Meadow where several hundred families were picnicing, tossing frisbees and generally lollygagging on the grass on this sunny pleasant Sunday.

Harlem

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Probably the biggest surprise yet in New York is discovering that Harlem is not the ghetto as depicted in years past. Sprucing up campaigns have left streets spotlessly clean…little old men with brooms like those ubiquitous to China and other Asian countries…sweeping up on every block.

We followed the walking tour recomended in the Lonely Planet guidebook which, from the 135th St. subway station, took us past Columbia University in the distance to Striver’s Row between Frederick Douglas Blvd and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. These two blocks of 1890’s architecturally interesting townhouses got their nickname in the 1920’s when aspiring African Americans first moved here. We passed the Abyssinian Baptist Church which had its origins from 1808 when a Lower Manhattan church was formed in response to segregated services. It moved here in 1920. Previous pastor and namesake of the nearby boulevard, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., became the first African American congressman. On the other side of the block we saw the Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (also originally in lower Manhattan) which played an important role establishing the underground railroad in the mid 1800’s. (Acres of African-American graves were covered over by skyscrapers in lower Manhattan that used to be populated by thousands of black slaves…a small area has been left open there as a memorial.)

On the NW corner of Adam Claton Powell Jr, Blvd and W 135th St. is the site of the Big Apple Jazz Club sometimes credited for how New York got its nickname. On another corner was the site of Ed Small’s Paradise, a hip spot in Harlem in the past and where management once fired a young waiter here named Malcolm Little, aka Malcom X. It’s now an office building. Nearby, the Harlem YMCA provided rooms for those denied a room in segregated hotels. Notable guests include James Baldwin, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens and Malcolm Little.
We headed south to Marcus Garvey Park, named for the unique Jamaica-born founder of the Back to Africa movement who lived in Harlem from 1916 to 1927. The park was filled with older black gentlemen playing chess.

We headed to 125th St, the main hub of Harlem activity where Bill Clinton has his offices. West on 125th we passed signs of Harlem’s “new renaissance” department stores and chains that are very controversial in Harlem today. Unfortunately the street as become another commercial mall–undistinguished and not much different than Lancaster Dr. in Salem, Oregon. The famed street peddlers are a thing of the past.

A giant white building at the corner of 125th and Adam Clayton Blvd was once the Hotel Theresa sometimes known as the “Black Waldorf-Astoria.” Entertainers playing the nearby Apollo stayed here. Fidel Castro insisted on staying here in 1960 because he thought he was being spied upon in lower Manhatten (suspect he was under equal scrutiny here).

We stopped at the famed Apollo Theater which usually has amateur nights on Wednesdays but this night was preempted by a play about Dorothy Height…a national figure I was familiar with when I volunteered for the Salem YWCA in the early 70’s. We were hungry and tired by this time so we skipped the Apollo and found a packed Amy Ruth’s Restaurant on W 116th St. where we thoroughly enjoyed soul food: gravy smothered pork chops, corn bread, fried catfish, collard greens– topping it all off with sweet potato pie. Then home via the subway.

Washington Heights

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The “F” subway line, if you take it to the very end at the northern tip of Manhattan Island, lets you off in a Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights. Everyone on the streets and in the stores were Spanish-speaking giving us the feeling we were in another country altogether!

The sidewalks were filled with cheap clothes…Bob snagged a turtleneck pull-over for $2.00 and I bought a pair of stylish black snow boots for $25. We had pork roast, ribs and fried sweet plantains at a restaurant but weren’t sure if we were getting a good sampling of Dominican food.

Hop On Hop Off Bus

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A good way to get a good overview of New York and to get a good look at the architecture is to sit in the upper level of one of these buses and if you are lucky you will be able to understand the tour guide. Each guide has a definite personality…one having to duck down to the bottom level when we went over the Brooklyn Bridge because she was afraid of heights. Often the attitude is one that believes wholeheartedly that New York is the center of the world…one such comment made Bob and I wince as we glanced back at the European, Asian and Australian tourists on board.

One route we took included Brooklyn and a local retired teacher was the guide. His brassy Brooklyn attitude was funny until a question got an answer that made fun of the question. For example, one European asked if the lake in Prospect Park was man-made. Of course it is, New York is bedrock (you stupid person!). We got on the bus in Brooklyn, which amazed the guide. He asked question after question…over the loudspeaker…the sense we got was that he was looking for a way to make us the straight man and to give him something funny to say at our expense.

The New York Attitude

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The New York attitude is a lot more complicated than simple rudeness. According to a local, it’s a mixture of being tough, brave, on your toes, jaded, overworked and intensely focused. Who needs to be pulled into a conversation or potential conflict with a crazy person. Why would I want to be waylaid with small talk when this 15-minute commute is the only time I have to myself all day?

But beneath all those jaded exteriors where no one is making eye contact, beneath all those masks, there is a sense that those who live in New York are all in this together…whether waiting for the next train rerouting, watching the homeless man tap-dancing through the subway car or waiting for the next 9/11.

One evening I sat next to a twenty-something on the subway who was reading a Chiang Mai Thailand guidebook. When I asked if she was traveling there (so much for not talking to subway riders) she flashed a quick smile and asked if we had been there. We just got back from Thailand a month ago, we said. Then she wanted to know which neighborhood we lived in in Brooklyn (usually the first question you get). She wanted to know if we had any suggestions for a guesthouse with it’s own bathroom. Bob referred her to a place he had stayed that also offered reasonable mountain hiking tours among the indigenous villages…just what she wanted. Have a great time, we said as she got off in her Brooklyn Heights neighborhood.

I think the tough outer shell that many New Yorkers adopt is out of necessity. How else to keep your sanity intact in a city that’s rife with all sorts of people. Busy, overworked, highly focused and goal-oriented locals must balance a skittish energy with surviving in a city where it is difficult to succeed…where just the apartment rent will often suck as much as three fourths of their income.

Service workers are efficient and task oriented and come off to us friendly Left Coasters as downright cold. On the other hand, when I want to be outside our apartment sometimes I will sit on the stoop and read the paper. To my surprise, about 30% of the people walking by will look up and say good morning or good afternoon. But then I am in their neighborhood. On a certain level I have some sort of an identity.

People in big cities in other countries of the world do not seem as cold, distant and rude, Bob and I say to each other…but then I think that even though we often wish service workers in other countries would be given training in customer service, there is not the added pressure coming from the efficiency ethic in those cities…and as a whole the people are ethnically homogenous so that social interactions are already predictable, easy and nonthreatening.

But this is my take and not Bob’s. Bob thinks that it is a learned, conditioned behavior and has a cascading effect. If people are nasty to you several times each day then it puts you in a nasty mood (fragile, friable and ultimately bitchy) and it snowballs from there…like coming home and kicking the dog when someone at work yells at you. Anyone with any other ideas?

The New York Identity

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This is a city of 8 million people-Bangkok’s is 9 million-but unlike Bangkok, it’s diversity is extreme. Therefore any generalization is sweeping. New York is a city for the young; the median age of residents is 34. Sixty-two percent of the population is white while 16 % is black, 15% is Latino and almost 6% Asian. 19% of New Yorkers live below the poverty line. A whopping 32% is foreign-born (46% in Queens) that speak hundreds of languages. An average of 73% has graduated from high school while 27% of these have completed some form of higher education. 12% is Jewish, around 70% are Christian, many Catholic, with the remainder adhering to Eastern religions, mostly Islam and Hinduism…14% of New Yorkers claim no religious affiliation whatsoever-a figure that is twice what it was a decade ago.

Of the city’s population aged five and over, 48% speak a language other than English at home. Of those, 52% speak Spanish, 27% speak an Indo-European language and 18 converse in an Asian or Pacific language. Walking the street you can hear as many as five languages in an hour. Hundreds of foreign-language papers are published in New York in everything from Hebrew and Arabic and German to Russian, Croatian, Italian, Polish, Greek and Hungarian.
all this from Lonely Planet guidebook.

But New York’s diversity doesn’t stop there. Hop a subway and take a look around. You will see a dreadlocked hipster plugged into his iPod, an older Latino guy asleep, a black lady shushing her baby in a stroller, a boy with a T-shirt with “Luxury Of Dirt” on the front, an artist covered with paint, an unfazed white guy with an ipod paging through the New York Times, a muslim girl in a blue plaid head scarf, others with smooth loafers, ratty sneakers, thigh-high furry boots that look like they are from Mongolia, a closed-eye black wannabe gangster nodding his head to the hip hop plugged into his ears.

And then there is the guy carrying a maroon monk’s bag with a trucker’s hat, highwater Thai fishermen’s pants and running shoes. Guess who?

My New York Ancestors

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In the beginning of this country, the New England colonies were being settled by the Puritans who endeavored to spread their intolerant “purist” religion across much of rest of the country. But from the time the Dutch West India Company sent Henry Hudson in 1609 to form New Amsterdam, Manhattan has been a rough and tumble place attracting the flotsam and jetsam of the rest of the world. New Amsterdam only occupied the tip of Manhattan and the “wall” along Wall St. was meant to keep both English and Indian raiders out of town. When the English showed up in in battleships in New Amsterdam in 1664 , Governor Stuyesant surrendered without a shot. King Charles II promptly renamed the colony after his brother the Duke of York.

Later, the Reverend John Moore whose descendents include my son Josh’s eighth great grandfather in his fraternal ancestral line, moved to the newly formed Newtown in Long Island in 1652 and became the first minister in the village. In the winter of 1655-56, he returned to England, probably to receive ordination. Moore returned to America in 1657, and died in September of that year. Moore, described as an educated man and excellent preacher, had descendants who were prominent and influential in the town and church, including two bishops of the Episcopal Church, two presidents of Columbia College, and Clement Clark Moore, the author of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. The Moore family developed the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan. The Moores’s ancient home in Newtown was torn down a few decades ago. A park off Broadway marks its location. See what comes of genealogy research? You never know where your ancestors will turn up.

Our family’s fraternal Hunt line also began in New York beginning with Ralph Hunt of Newton Long Island…one of the Hunt’s marrying into the Moore line. After moving from Long Island to Trenton New Jersey with his father Jesse, George Hunt, Josh’s GGG Grandfather, accompanied Capt. Moore, his brother-in-law, to Clermont County Ohio. “George and Sallie Moore Hunt emigrated the fall after their son, John Moore Hunt’s birth in 1816 to Batavia in Clermont County Ohio where George followed the profession of school teaching, and was the first schoolmaster in Batavia and subsequently taught two years at Columbia (Ohio). He returned to Batavia and settled on a nearby farm where he died in his sixty-eighth year. A History of Clermont County reads: “The oldest teacher remembered in the village [Batavia} was George Hunt, an old-time pedagogue, but withal an excellent teacher, with a discipline equal to military rule, who taught from near 1819 to 1822.” Ref: “History of Clermont County-1880” By Lewis Everts.

John Moore Hunt’s son, Charles Moore Hunt, Josh’s GG grandfather, fought for Ohio in the Civil War and spent 11 months in the Andersonville Prison…surviving to move to a farm in Klamath County Oregon.

Josh’s maternal ancestors, the Johann Mroczynski’s immigrated from Poland, through NY in 1892.

Our Brooklyn Neighborhood

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Video

We are sub letting a pleasant newly refurbished two bedroom apartment on Pacific St in a multi-ethnic, gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood called Boerum Hill. Bob and I enjoy exploring New York opportunities and other sites via the internet on our respectie laptops in the four-story apartment building that is WiFi equipped. We have three keys…one for the front door, one for an inner door and one for our apartment door. An Asian mailman drops the mail for the four building tenants onto the floor through a slot in the wall by the front door at the top of the stoop…each occupant sorting out his own mail. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal arrive on the front step each morning. The apartment directly across the street is condemned by the city…a big green rectangle with an X in it sprayed on the wall. Drivers seem to feel comfortable leaving their cars on the streets and there is rarely a vacant parking space—am glad that we left our autos in Oregon.

New York has recently reinstated a recycling program so there are multiple plastic barrels at the bottom of the stoop..one for garbage, one for paper and one for plastic and bottles… we were promptly and curtly corrected as to proper sorting by one of the tenants soon after our arrival. There is a contingent of garbage police and fines of $25.00 are given out if items are sorted into the wrong container.

Plastic bags of empty beer and pop bottles are often hung on the wrought iron fences that someone (a guy, freelancer, I think, who scuries the neighborhood carrying several stocked black plastic bags) will pick up and return to the store for the deposit. Once a month bigger items, like furniture, discarded TVs, microwaves etc., are left out for large item garbage pick-up. One day every other week cars are required to be parked on alternate sides of the street so the mobile street cleaners can sweep by unfettered. They usually just end up double parked on the other side of the street which makes for interesting traffic snarls in the mornings…cars honking as if it would make any difference.

There are two large grocery markets within about four blocks either way from the apartment. We wheel our groceries home in a two wheeled wire cart…just like the locals…and wheel our laundry to the nearest coin-operated facility a block and a half away. Down the steps, to the right and on the corner is the Boerum Hill Cleaners run by a gracious Korean family. Swing around the corner and up the block is the wide Atlantic Avenue that stretches all the way to the East River…which really isn’t a river but a narrow estuary of the Atlantic Ocean that surrounds the western end of Long Island.

On the next corner is a deli of multi-ethnic food items, fresh produce, and flowers run by Chinese family who speak Cantonese, English and Spanish. Turn right at the deli and the Islamic community fills the next several blocks…a school, apartments, halal food outlets selling California dates and multiple small cluttered storefront shops selling clothing, soap, perfumes, religious cds, books, and other unfamiliar items…in the middle of this mini-world…a U.S. Post Office. The call to prayer can be heard five times daily on the loudspeakers at a mosque nearby.

Across Atlantic Ave.is St. Cyrus of Turva Cathedral Belarussean Autocephalos Orthodox Church. Next to the church is a middle eastern restaurant owned by a Jordanian family with wondrously fluffy pita bread made fresh upon order. Pita bread, lamb kabobs, and a pint each of humus and babaghanouj provides a wonderful lunch with leftovers. Next door is a laid back French bistro (which we learned means “quickly” in Russian) that offers two entrees for the price of one on Wednesday evenings…and Bobby Dylan is heard on the stereo while sipping a glass of French wine. Next is a garden shop. Where do people garden? I wonder. Next is a New Orleans style restaurant with a live jazz trio featuring an older black gentleman vocalist whose style pulls me in, hook line and sinker. Next is a black Baptist pentacostal church.

Down Atlantic the opposite way and is an organic juice and food market. On either side of the market are two more churches…the Iglesias de Dios Pentacostal Church and the Templo Christiano de Brooklyn for the local Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Further down Atlantic on either side of the street are multiple antique shops, retro clothing shops, and many more corner delis.

Tthe Cobble Hill neighborhood is two blocks distant. It is a gentrified neighborhood centered around Smith St — a bit too hip avenue full of French bistros, Mexican, Thai, Peruvian, Italian, sushi, Indian, New York sandwich delis, West Indian, Cuban, soul food, Jamaican, Chinese take-outs and various sorts of fusion restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, specialty meat markets… most offering free delivery… and upscale bars full of younger after-work clientele just off the subways from their Manhattan jobs.

Interspersed in between are beauty shops that offer a multitude of mysterious hair styles to their black clients. In a stuffed-to-the-ceiling Chinese variety store on one corner ANYTHING needed in an average household can be found. Schools pour out black and Spanish-speaking children in the afternoon and young nannies push their little charges in strollers. Young entrepreneural men and women have developed a business of walking dogs, four, five six at a time, all behaving perfectly on their leashes…the back pockets of the dog walkers full of plastic bags at the ready if needed for dog do-do. There is a $1000.00 fine for not picking up the stinky stuff…Paris could benefit from this law.

The next street over from Smith is Court Street…with even more upscale restaurants and specialty shops. Walking farther down Court St. is an almost exclusively Italian neighborhood with Italian restaurants, bakeries and delis, a couple beauty shops and an old fashioned movie theater with a really bad sound system. The opposite direction on court leads to downtown Brooklyn and its signiture streets of Fulton and Flatbush ……located there is Junior’s , locally famous for its cheesecake… (they will quickly tell you that President Clinton ate there).

And we haven’t even begun to explore Park Slope, Red Hook or DUMBO and the Brooklyn Heights. Josh lives in nearby Greenpoint, a facimile of Warsaw Poland….only Polish heard on the street and Polish magazines sold in the smoke shops…and great pierogi restaurants.

All of these neighborhoods are filled with writers and artists…an inmigration from the expensive artist lofts in “The Village” (you don’t say Greenwich Village) and the hip SOHO district which means South of Houston St. pronouned “Howston.” Bob still confounds Amy and Josh by insisting on calling it Hewston St. by it’s Texas city pronunciation! And, like San Francisco, the locals know you are a visitor unless you refer to Manhattan as “The City.” People from New Jersey are called the “Bridge & Tunnelers.” And there you have it.

Three Minute Wedding

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On a lovely Sunday, September 4, 2005, Bob and I followed Josh and Amy to a specialty jewelry store in our gentrified Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn to pick up their hand-crafted rings. Amy’s mother, Debbie, works at a Safeway division office in Denver and the office had recently auctioned off small bags of “lost and found” items to it’s employees. Debbie had bid on one small bag…for $60.00…that yielded a diamond in a garish setting that no one thought was real. So Amy’s wedding ring has been set with a nice one karat diamond given to her by her mother. Two smaller diamonds, set on each side of the larger one, were from a pair of earrings that her mother had also given Amy when she sent her off to Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington. Lucky Josh!

The following Friday, September 9, Amy’s parents, Sid and Debbie, her sister Melissa and her husband Pat, and Bob and I, tripped along the slate sidewalks of Brooklyn with Josh and Amy–all of us in casual street clothes—to the courthouse a few blocks away. On the second floor we joined a long line of other variously dressed couples and their little clumps of supporters. Josh and Amy had already filled out the marriage application. It was 2pm and Josh and Amy now had to hand it in along with a $25.00 fee.

Tender interest and kindly officiary have their place at weddings but apparently not at the Brooklyn courthouse where probably upwards of 50 other couples had yet to be shooed through the line before the 3pm cut-off. Suddenly all extraneous members of our group, other than the couple and the witness, were tersely instructed in the spirit of strict bureaucracy to leave the line and sit in an adjoining waiting room. Where is Amy’s mom! She went to the bathroom! Someone go get her!
Stragglers.jpg

So we all dutifully sat and waited on red plastic chairs in the sterile yellow-cream colored room and watched the batches of the to-be-betrothed and their modest parties of three or four or five, clutching flowers and forms and purses and each other. Some seemed like young couples straight from high school or college, a dapper African-American man with a red handkerchief poking out of the pocket of his pin-striped suit, young Hispanic girls dressed to the nines in chiffon and spike heels, a pudgy middle-aged lady in a white blouse…maybe there for the second time…blue blazers, blue jeans here and there, perhaps a flower in the hair…..a cacophony…..

What a hoot! “Isn’t this fun,” Amy giggled! Josh grinned. The rest of us happy that this day had come! Bob and Amy’s mother excitedly taking pictures of all. Amy had scoffed at flowers being hawked by the vendor outside the courthouse doors. But she wore a lovely new black sheer blouse to go with her green slacks for this day.

The clerk calls out the name of each party which then files into the chapel. We all looked at each other weirdly when we heard “Ryan and Amy!” called out. Ryan is actually Josh’s first name but no one ever calls him that. The clerk stops us just outside the door of the chapel. “Where’s your witness?” she asks. As anyone with business on the second floor should know, so far as marrying goes, the witness is the indispensable person…without him/her nothing happens. Which means that three is the critical number. A bride and a groom hanging onto each other and a straggler with a camera in their hand. In our case five other stragglers. Amy’s sister Mellisa is the witness…and Bob is at the ready with his video camera to capture the proceedings as best and quickly he can before the whole thing is over.

We walk up two steps where the ash-blond clerk in a plaid jacket and black slacks closes the chapel door. We sit on the one seat…a bench against the wall…while the clerk gently informs the bride and groom that they should step up before the brown wooden podium that serves, one supposes, as Brooklyn’s secular analog to the altar…a 70’s red, orange, yellow and blue plastic “stained-glass” mosaic adorns the wall behind the couple, the podium and the clerk. rings.jpg

The “ceremony” immediately begins which entails a few seconds of legal boilerplate for each-the bride and the groom-followed by a quick call for objections. “Where are the rings? Should we put on our rings now or just wear them after the ceremony,” Amy whispers, sensing the whole thing might be over before they do the ring thing. The clerk reminds them they can kiss now…a sweet one…and we all smile. Suddenly it is over. The clerk hurries us out and our happy couple emerges from the room with smiling faces…a marriage certificate in hand. We head off for the elevators and the clerk calls for the next couple…

Wedding Announcement

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A few days before we left Portland for New York City, our son Josh, who is currently a chef at the Tocqueville Restaurant near Union Square in Manhattan, asked us to keep the following weekend open…giving us no idea what was going to happen. We are going out to dinner at his restaurant, I thought. But the whole weekend?

Josh’s lovely significant other, Amy, whom he had met at Whitman, picked us up at the airport from our Jet Blue flight from Portland on a rainy Tuesday and took us to their apartment in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn so we could see Josh for a few minutes before he left for work and before we continued on to our new abode. “This Friday Amy and I are getting married,” Josh said with a grin.