Walking B'way 4

Hirofumi Minami, David Chapin and I are doing a psychoanalysis of Broadway in five sessions. We chose to start our fourth visit at Zabar's, the iconic store on Broadway. Zabar's website proclaims, "New York is Zabar's...Zabar's is New York." While admittedly smaller than Times Square, I think it might rival it in its iconic status -- at least to insiders, most of whom don't go to Times Square and do go to Zabar's. We resisted the siren call of croissants, coffee, cheese from every nation on earth and a huge selection of cookware. Instead, we strolled up Broadway. As we were on the subject of icons, we got into a deep discussion -- which continues -- about the possibility that there is ONE iconic photo of Broadway. We all tried to imagine what it might be, and then to take that photo. I asserted that the iconic photo of Broadway was a crowd of people. That section of the Upper West Side is just full of people, bustling along and enjoying The City. In the spirit of eternal flow of people, I really enjoyed the McDonald's Walk Up Service, largely advertised on banners that you can see from far away, and pleasantly just there when you actually are parallel to it. A walk-up service is not something McDonald's offers at all locations--in other places, like Orange Main Street, McDonald's alters the pace of the street by inserting parking and drive-through service. To be part of Broadway, McDonald's turns toward the walker. Broadway more powerful than McDonald's!!!! Perhaps my photo is the iconic picture of Broadway. Somehow, I managed to convince my dear friends that Pain Quotidien deserved our patronage again! I love that chain, and its store, also carefully inserted in Broadway, was packed with people enjoying good lunch. I had warming and satisfying black bean soup and yummy bread. David shared quiche with us. I was grateful for my friends's indulgence. Since B'way 4, Hiro worked out an ingenious tool for studying our materials. He invented the "scroll," a series of powerpoint slides, like a roll of 35 mm film, that unfurls the walk and is accompanied by ideas stimulated by the experience. He invited all of us to join him in this activity, adding pictures and words to his file. It is profoundly satisfying as a way to assemble what we saw into something manageable. We have settled on this "start with an icon" thesis and so B'way 5 will start with the Dyckman Farm House in Inwood.

Walking Broadway 3

David Chapin, Hirofumi Minami and I walked a third segment of Broadway on January 7, 2013. We were joined by Scoot Lizama, a graduate student at CUNY, with years of experience looking at and photographing the urban landscape including the entire length of Broadway. Hiro had said that the image of New York, for people from other countries, is the image of Times Square, so we went to see that part of Broadway. We started at 47th Street, which is just above the square, and walked south, into the blare of lights. It was a cold morning, so it was not packed with people as it had been on New Year's Eve or as it would be on any warm day. The new open spaces made it possible to stand and examine the Square. There was much to see.

We watched people on the tkts stairs who were looking at themselves on television -- it was a car commercial and at the end, all the people were in the car driving away (notice the girl in the yellow jacket on the stairs and on the screen). David proposed that all the women on all the ads were lightly clad, young and beautiful. This lead to a careful examination of the giant signs. One stood out as having very normal women of many ages, and in clothes. That sign asked, "What will you do in 2013?" and then showed people who had given various answers like, "Forgive," "Be home to read bedtime stories to my children." As these were all things I thought I would do in 2013, I liked it a lot. We learned, by watching the whole thing, that this, too, was a commercial, this one for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As it hovered over the statue of Father Francis P. Duffy, who tended to the poor and destitute in Times Square, I argued that it represented a continuity of ministry. We enjoyed debating both these topics -- the use of women in advertising and ministry in Times Square, but we were getting cold and hungry for lunch, so we strolled on. We stopped to look at another billboard, apparently from a China trade mission, that give the history of silk over many millennia. I was telling David about how different this billboard was when it switched to young, scantily-clad, beautiful women in silk. It was a relief to walk south of 41st Street and enter "normal" New York. I don't think I'd ever considered Broadway in the 30s quiet, but by comparison to the assault of Times Square, it's wonderfully peaceful. Lots of people had settled into various seats in open spaces, and especially where there was a bit of sun. I saw two unconnected people who were next to each other, both, I thought, on their phones. As this has become an iconic image of our time, I was watching them. I realized that the guy was not on his phone, he was scratching a lottery ticket. I wished him well and reminded myself to guard against cliches and assumptions. We had lunch in a Korean restaurant. Hot soup hit the spot, as we'd been very cold. We reflected on all that we'd seen, and appreciated the quiet and spacious restaurant as respite from New York's Main Street and its neon heart.

Walking Broadway Two

David Chapin, Hirofumi Minami and I have dubbed our project "A Psychoanalysis of Broadway in Five Sessions." Hiro started the project of the psychoanalysis of cities on his visit to New York in 2002. We are looking at the intersection of that with my project of Main Street, by walking parts of Broadway. Having explored the Northern Manhattan end of Broadway on our last outing, this week we went to the Southern end and found two origins: the physical origin of the street and the the historic origin, at least metphorically, in the National Museum of the American Indian. This is a spectacular museum which has the particular quality of being free and open 364 days a year (closed on Christmas). We explored the exhibits, which display the remarkable cultural treasures that George Gustav Heye assembled in the first part of the 20th century. The diversity and the beauty of the collections help us see how many different ways people had invented to live in the Americas, long before European contact. I walked out onto Broadway almost expecting to see the old Indian Trail, just as Tony did when he went through the door in Howard Fast's novel. Instead there was a vista of great beauty, the opening onto the Canyon of Heroes, where New York City holds its ticker tape parades (see the photo of the view from the stairs of the museum). The sidewalks are lined with granite markers commemorating the parades, held for war victories, heroic deeds, and athletic accomplishments. Just there, in Bowling Green Park -- the first park on Broadway and the first to be established in New York City -- is the bronze bull, swarmed by tourists. A few blocks up we came to Zuccotti Park, made famous by Occupy Wall Street. Just past the park to the west are the emerging buildings of the World Trade Center. Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel remind us how historic this small bit of New York really is. We had directed our trip to City Hall, which is the end of the Canyon of Heroes. I felt heroic myself, having been in the presence of so much history. But I was also really really cold. We decided to have lunch at Pain Quotidien, over by the river, across from the Irish Hunger Memorial. It was curious to see it, as a few days before Christmas a friend told me about the great effort Americans made to send food to Ireland. Among those involved in this effort, he said, was Frederick Douglass, the great Abolitionist. To be in the presence of the memorial, and then to sit at the communal table with friends and strangers was a profound experience. I was cold, I got warm. I connected a story with memorial. I had soup, and felt better. Was that what Alain Coumont had in mind when he started?

Broadway All Day

Yesterday, which was Monday, December 17th, I started my day in the Bronx at Broadway and 231st Street. The point of being there was to launch an investigation of Broadway in Manhattan. Hirofumi Minami, David Chapin and I have decided to explore this ultimate main street, working in chunks, starting at the northern end. We met at 231st Street, and wandered south on the western side. We made such brilliant observations as that the donut shops were on the west and the car repair and gas stations were on the east. This might have meaning -- you never know. We strolled through Marble Hill, a little bit of Manhattan that is north of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, which joins the Harlem River to the Hudson River. We walked over the Broadway Bridge, one of three bridges over the Spuyten Duyvil. It was a long drop from the bridge to the water, and the water rushes by brown and fast. I crossed quickly, but David, who is quite intrepid, meandered and took pictures all the way across. When we got onto the island of Manhattan, we found ourselves in an arid stretch, populated by the Allen Hospital and then by the back side of a bleacher, apparently belonging to Columbia University, though no sign actually explained this fact. We stopped at Twin Donuts+, where we had Twinskies, much to David's delight. We then walked back to 231st Street, past the River Plaza Shopping Mall and the Marble Hill Houses, a large and well-tended public housing complex. We got our picture taken by a vendor, who was nice enough to pause from selling children's books and capture the beginning of our Broadway journey for posterity.

That was a pretty fabulous start to my Broadway day, but there was more. Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero, my friend and co-worker, decided that it would help us to mourn the events in Newtown, CT, if we held a vigil at a public park. I joined her for an hour of reflection and candlelight outside the Ring Garden at Dyckman and Broadway. A group from World Vision joined us.

The teens in that group had been part of a youth empowerment training which had lost one its members of street violence. They had organized a response to that tragedy, and it was good to learn what they had done. They discussed how to use their knowledge, and decided to make a better sign than the one we had. They went back today with this sign:

But even last night, we could tell that they had learned some important lessons about managing violence. I think this is what happens with violence -- people who have seen it before are like antibodies, reacting to an antigen -- they know it the next time they see it and they can react quickly to stop it. But back to my Broadway Day. Lourdes and I had a dinner date with our urbanism students, so we headed down to Manolo Restaurant, a tapas restaurant 25 blocks further south on Broadway at 175th Street. While the evening was mostly passed admiring the tapas, we also reflected on the good work the students had done, and the work that they will do after graduation. As the evening drew to a close, I crossed the street to get my car from the garage on Broadway, and drove up Broadway to drop Lourdes off at her house. It was a great day on a great American street.

My Mom, Maggie Thompson

Maggie Thompson, my dear mom, passed away February 18th, after a battle with recurrent breast cancer. We had a memorial for her on March 10th at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County. Friends and relations came from all over to laugh, sing, recite poetry, watch a video, share memories, eat cookies and listen to some transcendent music. It was such a joyous occasion, in celebration of a life of service, lived humbly and as best she could. I am grateful for the words of a friend who said, "It was such a gift to be present at her memorial service...such a powerful reminder that God doesn't call us to live "Great Lives" but to do great things and give freely so that our footprint in the lives of others would lead to even greater things... for the good of humanity and the world we live in."

One brief glimpse of life

I visited Houston last week on a very quick trip. I usually am able to make time to visit the city, in addition to accomplishing whatever work has taken me there. That was not possible on this occasion. My view of Houston was limited to the view from my 12th floor hotel window and the sights from the taxi from there to Houston Community College. There was little that was inspiring in that downtown area, until we got to the college itself. All of a sudden, through the large bright windows in the college building on Main Street, I could see chefs at work, moving quickly around the teaching kitchens in their white jackets and white chef hats. I only caught what two were doing: one was whisking something in a stainless steel bowl, while another was pouring liquid from one bowl into another. What a great class to be taking first thing in the morning!

Orange Nostalgia illuminates Main Street

Yesterday I went to the Orange Nostalgia event at the YWCA on Main Street in Orange. I got my junior and senior life saving certificates at the Y when I was a teen, but I haven't been there in decades. It was delightful to enter the building, which has so many memories, and share an afternoon with Orange historians. Organized by Tony Monica, an avid chronicler of the Orange scene, it was a time to be surrounded with sights and sounds of a place, echoes from many eras that gave our small city a dimension of IMPORTANCE. Tony had brought an aerial photograph of Orange before the freeway was built. It allowed to see the streets I used to walk in their fullness and effectiveness. Donna Williams had brought her uncle's high school yearbook. His classmates included Councilman Ben Jones, for whom a street is named not a 100 yards from the Y. Another classmate was Monty Irvin, who went to become one of the town's very famous sons and for whom the park was named. I brought my Tremont Avenue School 7th grade cooking notebook, with all the Orange Public Schools recipes and instruction pages. Karen Wells brought maps, books, newspaper articles and artifacts from her magnificent collection. Edward Marable brought a flyer advertising home lots in Seven Oaks. "Look at that!" we all said to each other, startled by some face, or notation, or bit of information. Historian Sarah Kirshen wandered through and nodded sagely. "Archives. The raw stuff, the real stuff that helps us understand the past."