It turns out I did not need to make this trip to the Science, Industry and Business Library after all. Somehow I got the impression that certain older Proquest databases were only available onsite, at this or most any other NYPL branch. This appears to be untrue, since I’ve been able to access everything from home that I got to from the library yesterday. Is it not obvious or did I just turn on my selective blindness as I so often do? Who knows… It was a fun hour and a half anyway, cruising for old newspaper articles as a derelict man sitting next to me did nothing but stare at the wall in front of him the whole time I was there. He did not move. He just sat there staring, possibly scrutinizing, or using the blank slate of the unadorned wall as a source for inspiration and greatness.
Yesterday I made the stupidass mistake of thinking I could casually saunter from the 53rd Street/5th Avenue subway stop to Rockefeller Center, just a few blocks away. I expected holiday crowds but this was way out of line with anything I might have anticipated. Individual intersections were fenced off, so you had walk maybe 50 feet toward the middle of the block just to cross the damn street. It felt like a herd of ants, but ants would rebel against being herded. Many streets were closed off completely to traffic, and when I finally made it to the Rockefeller Center concourse (and the 181) I felt like I had just navigated an elaborate maze set up as a lab test for rats to find their cheese.
For all this it never entered my mind until much later that the unusually thick crowds and the cordoning off of streets was in advance of the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center. I only know this now because I happened to hear mention of that event on the radio last night. I don’t know if that makes me an ultimately aloof New Yorker or just a self-absorbed ignoramus for not letting holiday festivities register in my mind as something for which to plan ahead. Unaware of the reason for such policing of 5th Avenue the mood was almost apocalyptic.
Yet, as I should have let influence my encroaching sense of anxiety, nobody else around seemed especially concerned or to have even taken note of the unusual barricading of the Avenue and side streets. I did try to calm my anxieties with that observation but it never quite silenced the white noise in my head.
212-779-2404, SIBL Library
