Recently in street notes Category
Irony is alive and well and parked on 18th street between 3rd and Irving:
I've seen this sign on phone booths all over the city (okay, true, that's not really that many places, given that phone booths are a vanishing species, soon to go the way of Checker cabs).
It's a great sentiment, right? We should all be doing all we can to encourage kids to read...and yet:
The image on this poster is the image from the movie, not Sendak's book.
Are we to conclude that reading will inspire us to become independent auteurs with a fondness for dress-up and Catherine Keener?
Or are we to draw a more cynical conclusion: read, sure, but first...stop at the multi-plex and buy a ticket for Jonzes' movie.
The boys finally started school, which is good because they were damn near ready to kill each other by Sept. 9. I love the solitude of my empty apartment but the beginning of school makes for logistical hell: after-school program or babysitting? who is doing pick-up? where is the soccer practice? when is the soccer game? what time is that meeting? where are the lunch-boxes? can you get from 20th and 2nd to Houston and Ave D in 25 minutes (barely); who has the metro card and are there any swipes left on it? (O for the days of tokens, when you knew exactly how many rides you had left with a jiggle of your coin purse.)
Pretty much the only thing Husband and I have talked about in the last week or so has to do with logistics or the cost of having our kids in "free" public schools (let's not even get started on school supplies, shall we?)
So the other day as I hustled Liam to a playdate on the other side of Union Square,listening to Liam with about 1/3 of my attention and making lists and plans with the rest of my mind, I got one of those reminders that the city sometimes puts in our paths--lessons that we don't even know we need: in this case, a sand painter hard at work. He wasn't following a pre-set design but was just streaming colored sand onto the asphalt in complex patterns and shapes. When I walked by the first time (the picture at the top of this post), I thought the painter must be close to finished.
But I was wrong--the painting was much more elaborate by the time I brought Liam home from his friend's house, and the artist was standing to one side looking down at his work, while sweat dripped down his face. He'd spent the better part of a day focused only on his design, which would vanish as soon as the weather changed (and, in fact, it rained the next day).
Okay, so I can't chuck everything, pull a Bruce Chatwin, and head to Australia to follow the songlines, but I can (occasionally) give my kids all my attention; I can remind myself that the logistics always (mostly) have a way of working out; I can take a deep breath and remind myself to be here now.
We went to Patsy's Pizza on University Place tonight, celebrating several things: more than three consecutive hours without rain; the conclusion of the first week of summer camp; the beginning of the 4th of July weekend; summer.
Patsy's is just down the block from Dean & DeLuca's, whose gray banner was slightly longer than Patsy's green flag. Husband and I have each spent hours and hours in D&D's elegantly high-ceilinged interior over the past twenty years: it's a great place to meet students, a great place to meet colleagues to discuss the inanities of students. Early in our courtship we sat and discussed books and miserable previous relationships with equal fervor. The coffee was too expensive but the muffins were divine - it was Starbucks before Starbucks and with a lot more character.
Well, it's gone. Only the flagpole remains:
Vanished, another casualty in the endless New York real estate wars. Husband and I stood and stared, amazed, and a few other passers-by stopped too, equally shocked by the apparent vaporization of a University Place landmark (albeit one with a string of health code violations). Someone walking by said it closed on the last day of June, three days ago. And already the interior has been stripped bare - no sign, no notice, no "thanks for the memories," nuthin. Just ... gone.
University Place is the street of my graduate-school youth: it's the site of the NYU English Department, which I would walk to from Union Square, where I got off the subway from, variously, Long Island City, Fort Greene, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and miscellaneous "between apartment" couches at friends' apartments. Dean & Deluca was a big splurge in those days - a bigger splurge than beer at the Cedar Tavern, also gone.
Perhaps it was the dual deaths of Farrah and MJ last week that have made me more nostalgic than usual, but I noticed a lot of "gone" as I walked back up the street, after Patsy's, while the boys scouted for the ice cream truck.
The antique store on the corner across from D&D - gone; the dueling futon stores across the street from each other - gone;
the Cedar Tavern - gone; the great fabric store on the corner of 14th street - gone. Further down the block, where Joyce Leslie used to sell wildly cheap clothes (and great tights)? A Duane Reade is coming. The legendary Lee Bauman's, the amazing and less expensive alternative to Le Petite Coquette, where bras cost more than a week of my salary? Now a Chipotle restaurant.
There are, however, several spiffy new condo buildings that have gone up to replace some of these buildings, a fact I'm sure you'll find completely unsurprising. And replacing the fabric store on the corner of University and 14th? No surprise there, either:
If things go on at this pace, I think pretty soon all of New York will be condos or banks, banks or condos. With the occasional Duane Reade thrown in for variety.
A few years back, Mayor Bloomberg made a commitment to add 200 miles of bike lanes to the city, which is a wonderful thing. Anyone who has pedaled down the new bike lane on 9th Avenue can testify to the pleasures of biking in the city without immediate danger of being brained by a bus
One (not so) small problem: where do you lock up your bike?
If you can't find room on one of the (rare) bike racks around the city, you're left scouting for sign poles, which are often crowded with bikes and which leave your bike at risk for being whacked by a car door, dinged by a cab, or sandwiched in by other locked bikes. (For a sort of helpful DOT map of bike racks, click here.)
The bike lane/bike rack problem reminds me of the school problem (okay, everything reminds me of the school problems, true): those glass-box expensive condos getting built to lure "families" into the city, without anyone, apparently, noticing that the schools didn't have room for all the shiny families moving into those shiny condos.
So for the moment, these bike lanes are lovely additions to our city, if what you want is a Sunday afternoon ride, or a little exercise. But for those of us who want to use our bikes to get to work, shlep groceries or children, do errands, get to class? As with the condo/school conundrum, Bloomberg again demonstrates that he is a mayor who can't quite see all the way down the food chain: if he really wants "the people" to start using bikes as alternative transportation, then "the people" need a place to park.
Today, Tuesday, Caleb and I saw these teams of people along 14th street. Each team had odd contraptions on their laps and was studiously looking at traffic. When Caleb and I asked them what they were doing, they wouldn't answer us.
What do you think they're doing?
This sign advertises a new building going up on East 11th street. What I want to know is: What does it mean to be "eco-indulgent"?
This block of East 11th used to be pretty scruffy but now, clearly, it's on its way to gentrification, just like the rest of the East Village. Given the history of the East Village, though, should we also think of the squatters who used to live here as "eco-indulgent," because they pretty much lived off the grid? What about the occupants of the tent city that used to occupy a big swath of Tompkins Square Park?
Eco-indulgent. Is that like flying on a private plane to a fund-raising concert for environmental awareness? Or buying the organic grapes flown in to Whole Foods from Chile?
But aren't indulgences the first things we get rid of when it's time to pinch pennies?
Maybe that means the new eco-indulgent will look more like the old East Village: the toothless guy slowly going through the trash to find bottle-deposit bottles?
