Summer in the city
By Leonard Quart
I’ve just returned to New York from a pleasurable two-week trip to London and Edinburgh a bit fatigued from trying to do too much in too little time. Sometimes I forget that I’m no longer the young man who, 35 years ago, explored almost every London neighborhood, without complaining of back pain or feeling a touch of exhaustion after walking four or five miles. Still, New York’s streets beckon, and I’m off to just wander aimlessly on a Sunday morning and later meet a friend.
The day is cool, breezy, and sunny, and walking the early morning streets of the Village and environs I discover that the only other people up are weather-beaten homeless men with blackened bare feet, sleeping under threadbare blankets in doorways with their tattered possessions packed next to them in stolen shopping carts. I also encounter two of the last alcoholics left on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, drinking cheap wine from a bottle. They murmur slurred threats about how I disrespected them because we had accidentally bumped into one another. Their drunken stupor, however, douses their anger, and they quickly forget about me. I move on, planning for this to be one walk where I don’t focus my attention on the less sanguine, darker side of city life.
On this summer day the air is crystalline; the few neighborhood trees and delicate iris and hardy impatiens beds are blooming; sunlight slants off a dormer window in the Colonnades Row — an 1833 landmarked marble Greek Revival building on Lafayette Street, across from the Public Theater. The sidewalks seem unusually free of litter; and on every other street one sees something new being built — including a multistory luxury hotel on Orchard Street (once a place where impoverished Jewish immigrants shopped) right next door to the fast disappearing clothing shops and stalls that still sell underwear and socks for bargain prices. There are few cars in the street, as if Mayor Bloomberg’s contentious congestion-pricing proposal (to reduce pollution from car emissions in Manhattan) has already been put into place and genuinely works.
On Houston Street I stop to get smoked fish at a famed family-owned shop, Russ and Daughters, which has been in the same location since 1914. Its articulate owner, who is now much less involved in the day-to-day business, informs me he is planning to write a book about the history of the store and its relationship to an ever-changing Lower East Side — his way of leaving behind his identity as an elite fish-seller and finding something new and meaningful to define himself by. It’s an exciting project — given the radical ethnic and social-class shifts, and physical transformation of the area over the years. That fact is brought home to me when I pass a basketball court in a sliver of a park on Forsyth Street, and notice that the players are no longer Hispanic but middle-class white men in their 20s, and Chinese adolescents.
Next day — a hazy one — I walk down to Washington Square Park. Winsome NYU students wearing tops and dresses that display bare midriffs and backs are poring over books; sweating office workers, looking constricted by their white shirts and dark ties, are eating takeaway lunches out of plastic containers; a grizzled pony-tailed leftover from the ’60s is covertly smoking pot; nursery-school children in bright yellow T-shirts are romping in the playground sandbox; a solemn African is playing a Djembe drum; and the park’s centerpiece, its fountain, is spewing plumes of water that black and Hispanic teen-age girls are splashing about in.
The park feels very different than it did in the ’80s when the playground was filled with syringes, condoms, and broken glass rather than the sounds of children playing and mothers and nannies gossiping. Where there were stocking-capped drug dealers blatantly hawking their wares to every passer-by, now a group of folk dancers from the Turkish American Association, wearing indigenous costumes, do their stuff before an appreciative audience. Musicians accompany them on the piccolo and a zurna (an Anatolian horn).
On this day the park feels as if it has gone through a resurrection that makes all the controversial overly expansive and expensive proposals for its redesign seem beside the point. Yes, Washington Square needs resurfacing, reseeding, and general repair, but its future lies in remaining the idiosyncratic, vital community institution it has always been, not a Manhattan version of Luxembourg Gardens, or a manicured set of symmetrical lawns serving a university’s graduation ceremonies and promotional brochures.
I know that essays like this one, built around describing and analyzing what I see and feel on my varied walks, are works in a minor key. But the act of writing gives shape and meaning to the jumble of emotions and impressions that one experiences. I am inspired by the words of Israeli novelist/essayist, David Grossman, speaking about far more serious and cataclysmic occurrences: “I write. I give intimate names to an external and foreign world. I make it mine.”
