New York, New York
New York Diary: Notes from 10th Street
10th Street crosses Manhattan at its waist, from the Hudson to the East River, through the West, Central, and Eastern Villages, to the outskirts of Alphabet City. A walk from one side of Manhattan to the other is about two miles long, an hour of travel, and ROSECRANS BALDWIN takes these walks frequently.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- First Scary Movies (Of Recent Note)
- Beloved Children's Books (Of Recent Note)
- Superpowers, Revealed (Of Recent Note)
Also by Rosecrans Baldwin
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- Joan Didion Crosses the Street (November 18, 2009)
- Window Shopping (October 28, 2009)
- Goodbye to All Them (September 23, 2009)
Also in New York, New York
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originally published in things 15
10th Street crosses Manhattan at its waist, from the Hudson to the East River, through the West, Central, and Eastern Villages, to the outskirts of Alphabet City. A walk from one side of Manhattan to the other is about two miles long, an hour of travel, and I take these walks frequently.
This morning is one reason I love the section of 10th Street in the West Village: warm, sunny, a clear sky, the trees in fall changing to orange bushels. The buildings here are the most Village-like in the city, townhouses and cottages, or old, short tenements, all in the confusing design of the West side with its own crooked logic.
A few people leave their buildings to run errands or sit outside on their stoops with a paper and some cigarettes. My friend O. recently told me that he had started to fear days like this, ever since the bright, blue morning in September when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. The weather makes me anxious, he said, it just seems too nice. A day ago, the weather was the same, and a plane crashed down in Queens, killing its passengers and some people on the ground, cause unknown.
At the Western end of 10th is West Street, also known as the West Side Highway. Across West is a running path that was built along the bank of the Hudson River from Wall Street to the Upper West Side. I can see up and down the Hudson River from this path, past the stalagmites of wasted piers to New Jersey, and South to a gray, non-descript skyscraper, shaped like a suitcase stood on its end, with a giant red neon umbrella built on its face.
The umbrella, up close, is probably three stories high; from 10th Street it seems small and agile, a child’s umbrella, something I could reach up and take down. It’s pinned against the side of the building as if the wind blew it there and it’s bright enough to be seen during the day. But it’s brightest and prettiest in the winter when it’s snowing, when the gray building has faded into the storm and the umbrella’s like a veiled tattoo on the sky.
* * *
There are bales of hay outside the front door of the Village School between Washington and Greenwich Streets. It’s not clear what the hay is for. There’s a construction site next door which may explain it, but why hay? No one’s there to tell me. No matter, the bales make comfortable seats, and I stay on one for a few minutes and watch the rare pedestrians this far West; there are few stores or restaurants here, only residential and factory buildings, so no tourists would come here unless they were lost.
A couple approaches, heading towards the water, the man towing a suitcase on wheels. When they’re close enough, I hear the woman admonish him, ‘Crazy, I just paid twenty bucks to have my eyeballs waxed.’ He doesn’t answer or acknowledge she spoke, just keeps going forward. I get up and continue walking East, puzzled, laughing, and it’s not until I cross Greenwich Street a block away that I realize she probably said eyebrows.
* * *
The stretch of 10th from Hudson Street to West 4th is closed to East-bound traffic by a police car, pointed South, barricading the entrance. I ask why the street is closed off, expecting the cop to say there’s a street fair or parade or something large enough to stop traffic, but it’s much simpler, ‘There’s a precinct,’ he says.
‘What?’ I ask. He mumbled and I didn’t understand.
‘There’s a precinct.’ He says this much louder, slowly, so I get it.
I walk away, a little confused, and see the 6th Precinct up the street, on the left, a black and purple curtain hung over its door, garlands of American flags hanging between posts and signs made by kids hung on sawhorses set up on the sidewalk. There’s a list of heroes that died—seven firemen, two cops—and a group of candles burning. There’s the poster I’ve seen everywhere in New York recently, an advertisement for the Billy Graham Prayer Center; it says ‘Need Prayer?’ I can’t take it seriously; I laugh; It reminds me of the milk commercials that ask, ‘Got Milk?’
I’m still not clear why the street’s closed off but I’m sad again and it takes me a minute to recover my composure and keep walking East
* * *
There’s a man running East on 10th between Bleecker and 7th with a deliberate, focused stride, staring at a pigeon that’s flying directly in front of him in the same direction, right at eye level, only a foot or two ahead. The two look like a pair of horses in a steeplechase, racing for the finish.
The pigeon breaks away after leading the runner for ten feet or so and the man slows down, as if he’s tired or confused.
* * *
I look in City Cricket—between West 4th and 7th—a store that sells clothes and toys for kids, where I spot some coats that are very small fireman jackets, in bright, rubbery yellow, with black buckles and silver reflective bands. It’s strange to see a coat you recognize as something large and sturdy redesigned on such a small scale. The coats are meant for three year-olds and must have short lives before being retired in the closet once the child outgrows it or loses interest. These are costume coats, leftover from Halloween; Firemen were very popular this year.
‘They’re cute?’ asks the saleswoman, Naoko, from behind the counter.
‘They’re very cute,’ I tell her. I ask Naoko if they’ve been popular recently and she says yes, they’ve been selling out, especially for Halloween. I ask her if they were ordered after September 11th and she says yes, but she is suddenly shy, as if I’m implying something unethical.
She’s quiet as she steps behind the register, her face becomes cold and blank; when I ask about the coats’ manufacturer, she refers me to the manager who is out. I turn to leave, wanting to tell her there’s nothing wrong with this, that I’m sure they’re good coats, that it’s good for children to have heroes, to pretend to be firemen or princesses or astronauts. But I say nothing and leave, walking slowly out the door so as to seem normal and unhurried.
Outside, down the street, at #199, I remember watching two kids fly kites from their stoop last April. It was a windy day and the children, a boy around six and his older sister, probably nine or ten, improvised kites by tying plastic shopping bags to spools of fishing line. They flew the bags with the floppy bellies half-full, slowly ascending outside the 2nd floor of their building, like jellyfish floating in the air.
* * *
The best bookshop in the West Village, if not in the whole city, is called Three Lives & Co. I’ve been buying books there for years and it’s one of the few stores where the clerks remember my name and the fact that I like extra bookmarks. It’s tucked into the corner of 10th and Waverly, across the street from Julien’s, an old gay bar where my girlfriend and I once took shelter on a rainy day and got strange looks from the old men. Three Lives & Co., named after Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, has a small, finely chosen stock, and the store itself is a refuge against the noise and disorder of 7th Avenue.
Toby Cox, the new owner as of February, is a tall and wiry man with a shaved head, wire-framed glasses, and a pen clipped to his shirt pocket. ‘I don’t feel like I’m the owner,’ he told me, ‘I feel like I host a place where people hang out.’ He has customers from all over the city, including women who come down from the Upper East Side solely for their book shopping. There are a thousand stories like this around the city, but they’re always reaffirming to hear; that in a city large enough to be its own world, there are pockets of friends that remember your name.
* * *
Outside Squad 18’s firehouse on 10th and 6th, a woman is tending a four-foot wide group of candles. She sits on a small wooden stool in the center of dozens of burning wicks, scraping wax off the street and re-lighting the candles when they’re snuffed out by the wind. The candles have been burning since September 11th and it’s already November. Squad 18 lost seven men in the World Trade Center: Billy McGinn, Eric Allen, Larry Virgilio, Andy Fredericks, Tim Haskell, Manny Mojica, Dave Halderman.
Between the countless prayers, poems, notes of thanks and love and sadness that are taped on the wall, there’s a large photograph of Manny Mojica, standing outside the house in a blue t-shirt and fireman’s pants, his thick arms tightly bound by his sleeves, smiling under his moustache. There’s a note underneath the photo addressed to Manny, signed ‘Love D,’ that reads ‘Passing by the firehouse / I would look for you / Your big arms / Your bigger smile.’ It’s not clear whether the author is a man or a woman, and in a neighborhood where a gay porn shop is only two doorsteps away, it’s as likely to be one as the other, but it really doesn’t matter, the letter and the photograph make a touching memorial, a very sad one-two combination, and I’m filled with the desire to have known Manny, to have noticed him before, to have a connection with someone so dear who’s now gone.
I passed the same firehouse last winter on the way to Three Lives & Co. when a truck left the building—sirens on, lights spinning—for a fire somewhere in the city. 10th is a narrow street and there wasn’t enough room for the truck to pull out because of a Ryder moving van parked illegally across the street. A couple firemen in their hats and coats hopped out to search for the van’s driver, screaming up and down the street, one of them asking the doorman of the Saint Germain if it was one of his tenants that parked the van. The doorman said no and the firemen screamed louder, running down into a nearby parking garage only to chase out a young man a minute later—yelling after him, ‘You shithead!’—who ran sheepishly to his van, hopped in, and peeled off to the shouts and jeers of the fireman and the crowd around me.
We kept cheering once the truck was down the street, half booing the dumb young guy who’d parked in a bad spot, but cheering more for the firemen, not only because they were firemen as people are wont to clap now, but simply because they were New Yorkers, and New Yorkers don’t put up with shitheads.
* * *
Emma Lazarus lived on 10th, between 5th and 6th, and while it’s not clear she penned the lines ‘Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door,’ while she lived on 10th, it’s nice to see the city has put a round blue plaque on the outside of the house, noticing she was there.
Other writers have lived on 10th, including Hart Crane, Samuel Clemens, and Allen Ginsberg, but it’s Lazarus’s poem that is more permanently attached to New York, specifically those five lines that are inscribed on the pedestal of the State of Liberty.
Curiously, the lines are printed differently at the International Arrivals Building at John F. Kennedy Airport, as Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted in a Times op-ed. At JFK, the line ‘wretched refuse of your teeming shore’ is replaced with an ellipse. It’s sad, that the airport’s managers were concerned enough with visitors’ impressions to tamper with poetry when the building itself is so awful.
* * *
5th Avenue and 10th is the best spot from which to gauge the capacity for American students to withstand hangovers. It’s where a palatial New York University dormitory building—a full corner tower surrounded by tall, luxury buildings—spits out students every morning from its spinning doors, dozens of them heading South five minutes before class, rushing across the streets towards Washington Square and the main campus.
It used to delight me in the mornings when I walked up 5th to my office and could pass them, the never-ending column of sallow faces in early fall, when they haven’t yet succumbed to piercings or hair dyes or expensive coats from Barney’s, when each one wears jeans and a sweatshirt and a monstrous backpack, slurping from donut-cart coffee cups, hurriedly smoking cigarettes—all mugging disappointment that it’s morning again though it’s obvious that everyone is carefree, happy, and quick.
* * *
Someone’s painted ‘Islam is not the enemy. War is not the answer.’ on the sidewalk between Broadway and University. Someone came along later and blacked out the ‘not’s.
* * *
Grace Church is a strange building on Broadway and 10th, butted up against real estate shops, antique dealers, video stores, but we love it anyway, because it’s old and beautiful and out of place, finished in 1846, with green, tended gardens between the sidewalk and the building, and a giant stained glass window like a third eye on its face that shines colorfully on the pews when the sun is rising.
I was raised Episcopalian but I’m no church go-er and haven’t been in years, but passing it I feel compelled to stop and push open the gate and wander around the front lawn, looking for a reason to walk in. I open the door and peer inside, expecting a singing choir or a minister to be reading a sermon but there’s only a middle-aged guy, slightly balding, in khakis and a blue shirt, setting up chairs, and it feels too ordinary for me to stay so I leave and close the door quietly behind me and look up when I reach the sidewalk and fall in love with the alpine spires. It’s very easy here to have romantic relationships with architecture.
* * *
New York, like the rest of the States right now, flies flags from every open post, and there are signs in most windows printed with a flag and messages like ‘America Attacked! America United!’ or Milton Glaser’s classic ‘I Love NY’ with the added clause ‘More Than Ever.’ Here, on the central stretch of 10th, there aren’t many flags; I only count four between 2nd and 1st avenues. But then they show up again like birds in a flock as I walk into the poorer blocks of 10th and it’s from here I want to make a collect call to America and say, you may pretend to love us now but you’ll hate us again (America secretly hates New York City, and in some places it’s not a secret), and when you start to hate us, remember, we love this country as much as anyone, possibly more. The sight of hundreds of flags used to make me uneasy but these days it’s welcoming, like seeing a group of friends waving from far away.
* * *
Outside a brownstone between 2nd and 3rd a light bulb is blinking on and off with the meter of a pulse and enough of a pause to suggest someone’s standing there in the shadows, massaging the switch with their tongue. I look up and no one’s there, but wouldn’t it have been a perfect New York moment to have found someone, innocently licking the switch?
* * *
I cross 2nd Avenue from the greenmarket outside Street Mark’s and see a blind man heading towards me, just stepping off the opposite curb when he hits the lamppost with his shoulder and quickly backs up, saying loudly, ‘Watch it there buddy.’
I touch his arm and ask if I can help and he says sure, take me across, and we walk diagonally North. I’m compelled—God knows why—to start describing the scene around us, so I tell him about the curb coming up, the cars in front of us, the woman stepping off the sidewalk. He thanks me once we reach the sidewalk and starts walking away, tapping his cane on the ground, when he realizes he’s going the wrong way and turns around.
* * *
There’s a storefront between 1st and A with white curtains and a small sign saying the store belongs to Praxis, an art group, and then on the door there’s a collection box with a paper on the outside that reads, Tell us what you need a prayer for, and we’ll perform it for you. Just fill out the form and put it in the mail slot below with your donation.
I look for forms but can’t find any, so I say a prayer anyway, the first time in a while, asking for blessings, for someone to watch over us, all of us New Yorkers. New Yorkers are frequently accused of being self-absorbed but after a walk across the city, with all I’ve seen, I want to ask the accusers, Why Not?
* * *
The Jacob Riis houses—a ring of low-income apartment buildings—end 10th Street past Avenue D and from there it’s the FDR drive, a park, then the East River, then Brooklyn as far as the eye can see. I walk past a hot-dog cart, past a group of old men gossiping outside, a bus that’s waiting for passengers, and walk up onto the bridge that crosses the FDR. It has a big sign above the highway warning South-bound cars ‘U.N. WEEK. AVOID EAST SIDE MANHATTAN.’ A day after the plane crashed in Queens, the geography seems a bit misplaced.
It’s dusk. From here I look back on the island and barely see the Chrysler building and the Empire State above the East Village’s short tenements, the Empire State lit up in red, white, and blue lights, the Chrysler in shining white: two of the most spectacular buildings in Manhattan looking smug and short from here. This depresses me and I hurry across the bridge, down the ramp, and into the East River Park.
A Latino couple approaches me, both dressed in thick down coats, the guy with a long fishing pole on his shoulder. I walk past the empty tennis courts and head for the river. A man reading The New York Post eyes me warily, as does a woman on the bleachers, smoking and talking on her cell phone while her dog wags its tail. On the water a white sailboat is slowly heading South with two people barely visible on its deck. I sit down and watch the water roll up against the city as the sky turns a cranberry red, the entire horizon made of a dusty Brooklyn.
When it’s quiet in Manhattan, there’s always the sound of motion around you, like wind blowing through a metal pipe. I head home.
10th Street crosses Manhattan at its waist, from the Hudson to the East River, through the West, Central, and Eastern Villages, to the outskirts of Alphabet City. A walk from one side of Manhattan to the other is about two miles long, an hour of travel, and I take these walks frequently.
This morning is one reason I love the section of 10th Street in the West Village: warm, sunny, a clear sky, the trees in fall changing to orange bushels. The buildings here are the most Village-like in the city, townhouses and cottages, or old, short tenements, all in the confusing design of the West side with its own crooked logic.
A few people leave their buildings to run errands or sit outside on their stoops with a paper and some cigarettes. My friend O. recently told me that he had started to fear days like this, ever since the bright, blue morning in September when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. The weather makes me anxious, he said, it just seems too nice. A day ago, the weather was the same, and a plane crashed down in Queens, killing its passengers and some people on the ground, cause unknown.
At the Western end of 10th is West Street, also known as the West Side Highway. Across West is a running path that was built along the bank of the Hudson River from Wall Street to the Upper West Side. I can see up and down the Hudson River from this path, past the stalagmites of wasted piers to New Jersey, and South to a gray, non-descript skyscraper, shaped like a suitcase stood on its end, with a giant red neon umbrella built on its face.
The umbrella, up close, is probably three stories high; from 10th Street it seems small and agile, a child’s umbrella, something I could reach up and take down. It’s pinned against the side of the building as if the wind blew it there and it’s bright enough to be seen during the day. But it’s brightest and prettiest in the winter when it’s snowing, when the gray building has faded into the storm and the umbrella’s like a veiled tattoo on the sky.
There are bales of hay outside the front door of the Village School between Washington and Greenwich Streets. It’s not clear what the hay is for. There’s a construction site next door which may explain it, but why hay? No one’s there to tell me. No matter, the bales make comfortable seats, and I stay on one for a few minutes and watch the rare pedestrians this far West; there are few stores or restaurants here, only residential and factory buildings, so no tourists would come here unless they were lost.
A couple approaches, heading towards the water, the man towing a suitcase on wheels. When they’re close enough, I hear the woman admonish him, ‘Crazy, I just paid twenty bucks to have my eyeballs waxed.’ He doesn’t answer or acknowledge she spoke, just keeps going forward. I get up and continue walking East, puzzled, laughing, and it’s not until I cross Greenwich Street a block away that I realize she probably said eyebrows.
The stretch of 10th from Hudson Street to West 4th is closed to East-bound traffic by a police car, pointed South, barricading the entrance. I ask why the street is closed off, expecting the cop to say there’s a street fair or parade or something large enough to stop traffic, but it’s much simpler, ‘There’s a precinct,’ he says.
‘What?’ I ask. He mumbled and I didn’t understand.
‘There’s a precinct.’ He says this much louder, slowly, so I get it.
I walk away, a little confused, and see the 6th Precinct up the street, on the left, a black and purple curtain hung over its door, garlands of American flags hanging between posts and signs made by kids hung on sawhorses set up on the sidewalk. There’s a list of heroes that died—seven firemen, two cops—and a group of candles burning. There’s the poster I’ve seen everywhere in New York recently, an advertisement for the Billy Graham Prayer Center; it says ‘Need Prayer?’ I can’t take it seriously; I laugh; It reminds me of the milk commercials that ask, ‘Got Milk?’
I’m still not clear why the street’s closed off but I’m sad again and it takes me a minute to recover my composure and keep walking East
There’s a man running East on 10th between Bleecker and 7th with a deliberate, focused stride, staring at a pigeon that’s flying directly in front of him in the same direction, right at eye level, only a foot or two ahead. The two look like a pair of horses in a steeplechase, racing for the finish.
The pigeon breaks away after leading the runner for ten feet or so and the man slows down, as if he’s tired or confused.
I look in City Cricket—between West 4th and 7th—a store that sells clothes and toys for kids, where I spot some coats that are very small fireman jackets, in bright, rubbery yellow, with black buckles and silver reflective bands. It’s strange to see a coat you recognize as something large and sturdy redesigned on such a small scale. The coats are meant for three year-olds and must have short lives before being retired in the closet once the child outgrows it or loses interest. These are costume coats, leftover from Halloween; Firemen were very popular this year.
‘They’re cute?’ asks the saleswoman, Naoko, from behind the counter.
‘They’re very cute,’ I tell her. I ask Naoko if they’ve been popular recently and she says yes, they’ve been selling out, especially for Halloween. I ask her if they were ordered after September 11th and she says yes, but she is suddenly shy, as if I’m implying something unethical.
She’s quiet as she steps behind the register, her face becomes cold and blank; when I ask about the coats’ manufacturer, she refers me to the manager who is out. I turn to leave, wanting to tell her there’s nothing wrong with this, that I’m sure they’re good coats, that it’s good for children to have heroes, to pretend to be firemen or princesses or astronauts. But I say nothing and leave, walking slowly out the door so as to seem normal and unhurried.
Outside, down the street, at #199, I remember watching two kids fly kites from their stoop last April. It was a windy day and the children, a boy around six and his older sister, probably nine or ten, improvised kites by tying plastic shopping bags to spools of fishing line. They flew the bags with the floppy bellies half-full, slowly ascending outside the 2nd floor of their building, like jellyfish floating in the air.
The best bookshop in the West Village, if not in the whole city, is called Three Lives & Co. I’ve been buying books there for years and it’s one of the few stores where the clerks remember my name and the fact that I like extra bookmarks. It’s tucked into the corner of 10th and Waverly, across the street from Julien’s, an old gay bar where my girlfriend and I once took shelter on a rainy day and got strange looks from the old men. Three Lives & Co., named after Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, has a small, finely chosen stock, and the store itself is a refuge against the noise and disorder of 7th Avenue.
Toby Cox, the new owner as of February, is a tall and wiry man with a shaved head, wire-framed glasses, and a pen clipped to his shirt pocket. ‘I don’t feel like I’m the owner,’ he told me, ‘I feel like I host a place where people hang out.’ He has customers from all over the city, including women who come down from the Upper East Side solely for their book shopping. There are a thousand stories like this around the city, but they’re always reaffirming to hear; that in a city large enough to be its own world, there are pockets of friends that remember your name.
Outside Squad 18’s firehouse on 10th and 6th, a woman is tending a four-foot wide group of candles. She sits on a small wooden stool in the center of dozens of burning wicks, scraping wax off the street and re-lighting the candles when they’re snuffed out by the wind. The candles have been burning since September 11th and it’s already November. Squad 18 lost seven men in the World Trade Center: Billy McGinn, Eric Allen, Larry Virgilio, Andy Fredericks, Tim Haskell, Manny Mojica, Dave Halderman.
Between the countless prayers, poems, notes of thanks and love and sadness that are taped on the wall, there’s a large photograph of Manny Mojica, standing outside the house in a blue t-shirt and fireman’s pants, his thick arms tightly bound by his sleeves, smiling under his moustache. There’s a note underneath the photo addressed to Manny, signed ‘Love D,’ that reads ‘Passing by the firehouse / I would look for you / Your big arms / Your bigger smile.’ It’s not clear whether the author is a man or a woman, and in a neighborhood where a gay porn shop is only two doorsteps away, it’s as likely to be one as the other, but it really doesn’t matter, the letter and the photograph make a touching memorial, a very sad one-two combination, and I’m filled with the desire to have known Manny, to have noticed him before, to have a connection with someone so dear who’s now gone.
I passed the same firehouse last winter on the way to Three Lives & Co. when a truck left the building—sirens on, lights spinning—for a fire somewhere in the city. 10th is a narrow street and there wasn’t enough room for the truck to pull out because of a Ryder moving van parked illegally across the street. A couple firemen in their hats and coats hopped out to search for the van’s driver, screaming up and down the street, one of them asking the doorman of the Saint Germain if it was one of his tenants that parked the van. The doorman said no and the firemen screamed louder, running down into a nearby parking garage only to chase out a young man a minute later—yelling after him, ‘You shithead!’—who ran sheepishly to his van, hopped in, and peeled off to the shouts and jeers of the fireman and the crowd around me.
We kept cheering once the truck was down the street, half booing the dumb young guy who’d parked in a bad spot, but cheering more for the firemen, not only because they were firemen as people are wont to clap now, but simply because they were New Yorkers, and New Yorkers don’t put up with shitheads.
Emma Lazarus lived on 10th, between 5th and 6th, and while it’s not clear she penned the lines ‘Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door,’ while she lived on 10th, it’s nice to see the city has put a round blue plaque on the outside of the house, noticing she was there.
Other writers have lived on 10th, including Hart Crane, Samuel Clemens, and Allen Ginsberg, but it’s Lazarus’s poem that is more permanently attached to New York, specifically those five lines that are inscribed on the pedestal of the State of Liberty.
Curiously, the lines are printed differently at the International Arrivals Building at John F. Kennedy Airport, as Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted in a Times op-ed. At JFK, the line ‘wretched refuse of your teeming shore’ is replaced with an ellipse. It’s sad, that the airport’s managers were concerned enough with visitors’ impressions to tamper with poetry when the building itself is so awful.
5th Avenue and 10th is the best spot from which to gauge the capacity for American students to withstand hangovers. It’s where a palatial New York University dormitory building—a full corner tower surrounded by tall, luxury buildings—spits out students every morning from its spinning doors, dozens of them heading South five minutes before class, rushing across the streets towards Washington Square and the main campus.
It used to delight me in the mornings when I walked up 5th to my office and could pass them, the never-ending column of sallow faces in early fall, when they haven’t yet succumbed to piercings or hair dyes or expensive coats from Barney’s, when each one wears jeans and a sweatshirt and a monstrous backpack, slurping from donut-cart coffee cups, hurriedly smoking cigarettes—all mugging disappointment that it’s morning again though it’s obvious that everyone is carefree, happy, and quick.
Someone’s painted ‘Islam is not the enemy. War is not the answer.’ on the sidewalk between Broadway and University. Someone came along later and blacked out the ‘not’s.
Grace Church is a strange building on Broadway and 10th, butted up against real estate shops, antique dealers, video stores, but we love it anyway, because it’s old and beautiful and out of place, finished in 1846, with green, tended gardens between the sidewalk and the building, and a giant stained glass window like a third eye on its face that shines colorfully on the pews when the sun is rising.
I was raised Episcopalian but I’m no church go-er and haven’t been in years, but passing it I feel compelled to stop and push open the gate and wander around the front lawn, looking for a reason to walk in. I open the door and peer inside, expecting a singing choir or a minister to be reading a sermon but there’s only a middle-aged guy, slightly balding, in khakis and a blue shirt, setting up chairs, and it feels too ordinary for me to stay so I leave and close the door quietly behind me and look up when I reach the sidewalk and fall in love with the alpine spires. It’s very easy here to have romantic relationships with architecture.
New York, like the rest of the States right now, flies flags from every open post, and there are signs in most windows printed with a flag and messages like ‘America Attacked! America United!’ or Milton Glaser’s classic ‘I Love NY’ with the added clause ‘More Than Ever.’ Here, on the central stretch of 10th, there aren’t many flags; I only count four between 2nd and 1st avenues. But then they show up again like birds in a flock as I walk into the poorer blocks of 10th and it’s from here I want to make a collect call to America and say, you may pretend to love us now but you’ll hate us again (America secretly hates New York City, and in some places it’s not a secret), and when you start to hate us, remember, we love this country as much as anyone, possibly more. The sight of hundreds of flags used to make me uneasy but these days it’s welcoming, like seeing a group of friends waving from far away.
Outside a brownstone between 2nd and 3rd a light bulb is blinking on and off with the meter of a pulse and enough of a pause to suggest someone’s standing there in the shadows, massaging the switch with their tongue. I look up and no one’s there, but wouldn’t it have been a perfect New York moment to have found someone, innocently licking the switch?
I cross 2nd Avenue from the greenmarket outside Street Mark’s and see a blind man heading towards me, just stepping off the opposite curb when he hits the lamppost with his shoulder and quickly backs up, saying loudly, ‘Watch it there buddy.’
I touch his arm and ask if I can help and he says sure, take me across, and we walk diagonally North. I’m compelled—God knows why—to start describing the scene around us, so I tell him about the curb coming up, the cars in front of us, the woman stepping off the sidewalk. He thanks me once we reach the sidewalk and starts walking away, tapping his cane on the ground, when he realizes he’s going the wrong way and turns around.
There’s a storefront between 1st and A with white curtains and a small sign saying the store belongs to Praxis, an art group, and then on the door there’s a collection box with a paper on the outside that reads, Tell us what you need a prayer for, and we’ll perform it for you. Just fill out the form and put it in the mail slot below with your donation.
I look for forms but can’t find any, so I say a prayer anyway, the first time in a while, asking for blessings, for someone to watch over us, all of us New Yorkers. New Yorkers are frequently accused of being self-absorbed but after a walk across the city, with all I’ve seen, I want to ask the accusers, Why Not?
The Jacob Riis houses—a ring of low-income apartment buildings—end 10th Street past Avenue D and from there it’s the FDR drive, a park, then the East River, then Brooklyn as far as the eye can see. I walk past a hot-dog cart, past a group of old men gossiping outside, a bus that’s waiting for passengers, and walk up onto the bridge that crosses the FDR. It has a big sign above the highway warning South-bound cars ‘U.N. WEEK. AVOID EAST SIDE MANHATTAN.’ A day after the plane crashed in Queens, the geography seems a bit misplaced.
It’s dusk. From here I look back on the island and barely see the Chrysler building and the Empire State above the East Village’s short tenements, the Empire State lit up in red, white, and blue lights, the Chrysler in shining white: two of the most spectacular buildings in Manhattan looking smug and short from here. This depresses me and I hurry across the bridge, down the ramp, and into the East River Park.
A Latino couple approaches me, both dressed in thick down coats, the guy with a long fishing pole on his shoulder. I walk past the empty tennis courts and head for the river. A man reading The New York Post eyes me warily, as does a woman on the bleachers, smoking and talking on her cell phone while her dog wags its tail. On the water a white sailboat is slowly heading South with two people barely visible on its deck. I sit down and watch the water roll up against the city as the sky turns a cranberry red, the entire horizon made of a dusty Brooklyn.
When it’s quiet in Manhattan, there’s always the sound of motion around you, like wind blowing through a metal pipe. I head home.
—Published November 15, 2001
