22 posts tagged “new york”
Recently, my friend Walker's Brooklyn neighborhood was hit by a graffiti artist. Several buildings in the area were defaced, including the gallery he runs on Van Brunt and Union Street.
Ingenious.
(Update 12 August 2008: WORK logo hand-painted by Bowie Zunino. Thanks to Eve for helping me give credit where it's due.)
People fish in the East River every day, just off Market Slip, near my apartment building. These days, they have some art to admire across the way.
(Thanks to Chuck for the amazing photos from the day.)
Living downtown has given me the opportunity to explore the neighborhoods and sites that I saw much more of when I was a kid, on the weekends, when my parents would trek us down to the South Street Seaport or the World Trade Center's subterranean mall.
One unforgettable part of these weekend walks was the historic Fulton Fish Market, which in 2005, moved from South Street, downtown, all the way to Hunts Point, in The Bronx. Long affiliated with the mafia and the street stall vendors of the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Italy, the fishmarket was an integral part of the bustle of the seaport, and its departure from Manhattan signified, for many of us, a changing of the guard in lower New York. The new facility in the Bronx promised better parking for trucks, larger space, and generally better circulation for the bustling fish hub; personally, I think the market was moved because it was an eyesore and a stinkbomb to tourists.
Today, the building's shell still stands along the East River, adjacent to the South Street Seaport Mall, about ten minutes walk from where I live. It's a bit sad, and an extremely nostalgic place for me. And I'm convinced I can still smell the scales and guts and dampness of the old market if I close my eyes and try hard enough.
I'm a little bit of a fraud. I wore a original, Anri-handmade shirt that said "1/2 the genes, all the pride" for today's Japan Day race in Central Park. But I'm not half-Japanese like Anri, Sonya and Kae, pictured below. Which one of these is not like the other?
"Does that shirt mean you guys are half-Japanese? Because I'm a halfie too, and my friends and I joke about only being friends with other bi-racial people...Go Obama!"
And then she walked away. hilarious.
Some other photos from the day, when Ilya and Anri's parents joined us for Japan Day festivities in the East Meadow. We met Hello Kitty...
(Thanks to Mizz Sonya for the great photos!)
Yesterday, my little brother graduated from Boston College. More on the actual graduation soon, but I wanted to recount this little anecdote first.
We spent the weekend splitting time between my mother's house in Orange County (New York) and later Boston, where we checked into a Holiday Inn Express some ways from the restaurant where my brother had made his "Last Supper" dinner reservation for the family. My sister and I decided that, having spent four hours in a car, we would take public transportation to the restaurant. This is the conversation that ensued in the lobby of our hotel:
me: My sister and I were hoping to take public transportation to a restaurant on Newbury Street this evening, and we were wondering if you could tell us where the nearest T stop is?
Trina, hotel front desk: Um, I'd really recommend taking a taxi. It's fairly complicated.me: Oh! Um...really? Okay....
Trina: Well, let me ask—where are you from?
me: Oh! Um, New York City..?
Trina: Oh, it's really NOT that complicated.
This, for me, was one of my favorite conversations evah.
First, Trina, the very nice front desk woman, had clearly had some bad experiences sending hotel guests to the T stop (which did end up being a short walk through a kind of dark, sketchy neighborhood).
Second, she reconsidered telling us how to get to the T in the thirty-second conversation, even though we didn't really protest.
Three, when she found out we were from New York, she did not hesitate to give us the directions. Lastly, can you imagine what other places we might have said we were from that would have warranted such a 180?
We made it to the restaurant just fine. I had scallops and asparagus.
Volunteering ain't for sissies. Take for instance, the fact that I had to work a PEN World Voices event on Friday that included the author you see to your right, Roberto Saviano, who is wanted by the Camorra crime family in Naples.
My life was in danger.
Well, not really. But his life sort of is. The man had bodyguards. And they had guns.
Also, he was such a male person, sitting akimbo, answering questions in a kind of leisurely way that only the Italians have perfected. One of the
nice one.
