It is a warm, quiet place on a cold, windy day. This is a place I thought had closed down long ago and forever. I also remember it being in a different location, around Canal Street. This is at 10 River Terrace, where I chose a seat looking out upon some beautiful snow-covered SCAFFOLDING. I thought this might be a visitable space on my workday but it’s just a wish too far. I would be allowed mere minutes before having to turn around and go back. Feeling very anxious today, no idea why. I ate a lunch-esque sandwich for breakfast and dreamed of the house in which I grew up having become roach infested There were always roaches. It’s Florida, after all, where not having roaches makes you a freaking freak. The dream was vivid.
There is no fee to be here but your email address is required. I’m sure a fake address would have gotten me in but I don’t care. Let them notee that someone here does not use one of the mainstream email provider domains.
Next to me is a book called JUNK by Tommy Pico. THe walls are lined with more books of poetry than I have ever seen in one place, under one roof, or under 1000 rooves (going to spell it like that just to be difficult. I’m also sticking with “CHIEVES” instead of the more bristly “CHIEFS”.) Being surrounded by this quantity of poetry books makes my subscription to “Poetry” magazine seem utterly paltry, but more than that it makes the esteem that title holds seem diminished. Certainly the editors there cannot have read or even been made aware of every item on these shelves? (shelfs?) Is there too much poetry? Is there too much existence? Too much of everything?
I also want to get to know Battery Park City a little better. It’s always been kind of a mystery to me, a mystery as to why it has some primacy in City lore. Nearby I know the Rockefeller Park, at least I think that’s what it’s called, where Tom Ptterman (the dog murderer) has some of his work on permanent display. Permanence.
I was thinking of Joe again today. He died about a year ago. We’d been friends for about 30 years. He moved away from New York and came back to visit after some years. He said he spent a day looking for some trace of his time here, some evidence that he’d spent something like 25 years of his life in this place. Most of his friends were gone, the stores and shops he knew were gone. But at the Strand bookstore he happened upon a book comprising hundreds of Polaroid photos people had submitted to be curated by some well-known photo editor. Joe’s submission made the cut, along with 5 or 6 hundred others, and there it was, in the used books bin at the Strand. He found it. He found his evidence that he had some kind of productive life here. I never saw the book and don’t know what the picture captured but he said it was some place or object that was identifiably New York.
What other evidence did he need? I actually think he took special pride when I (or others) recounted comments or observations he made years earlier. I remember him decrying the difference between having a life and having a career, referring in particular to some layabouts he used to spend time with on Coney Island. “THEY DIDN’T HAVE CAREERS, THEY HAD LIVES,” he would say. I also frequently recounted his account of visiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland during its opening week. Everything about the place was as you might expect. The Beatles here, Elvis there. But with no explanation or introduction visitors would walk up a set of stairs and find, in a glass enclosure, an urn with the cremated remains of Alan Freed, the man who is said to have coined the term “Rock and Roll.” This was 1983 and people didn’t really talk about cremation like we do today. It was kind of taboo. So for a visitor to the reasonably joyful R&R Hall of Fame it was something of a shock to walk up some stairs and find yourself looking at “THAT!” I’ve told that story many times, to Joe’s credit of course.
My counter to that tale is when I first discovered columbariums at St. Michael’s Cemetery. In the first moments of discovery I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at. THen it hit me. Duh. It’s a cemetery. The structures themselves seemed intimidating to me, as at first I thought they must have been convents or sanctuaries of some sort for people of the cloth. But no. Instead of being a place of life it a place stacked to the ceilings with death.
But I found joy in it. THe niches were small but they provided far more room for creative outlets than a common tombstone. One woman who had evidently been a puppeteer had a few of her puppets alongside her urn. Many people had baseballs and Yankees memorabilia.
But there was one kid I found who had me puzzled. THere was a framed photo, a baseball, a couple of other things… and then I saw the barely visible glass model of the Twin Towers, difficulat to see but once seen I next looked for the urn. There was none. I next saw his date of death: 9/11/2001. With no urn in his niche he must have been among those cremated on live television as the world watched.
Some day I will find the photos I took from the top of the towers, on the Observation Deck. The old joke about the towers was that the observation deck was the best place to see them, because it was the only place for miles around where you could not see them. Hardee-har-har.
One of my college classroom buildings was designed by the same architect as the Twin Towers, Minoru Yamasaki. The building was only three stories but the resemblance to the mighty Twin Towers was unmistakable. The sentiment about this was a kind of gritted teeth unease. “Oh, great, your building was designed by that guy.” It was my first glimpse of the nearly universal disdain for those towers. I never hated them but others certainly did.
When I got to New York I made a visit to the Towers one of the first tasks. When I got to them I thought “Yeah, those look like my classroom building on steroids.”
Okay, I gotta go. This silent library is suddenly occupied by gabbing college kids.