Item From the Past: St. John the Divine Detail

On November 5, 2000, I did a walkabout in Manhattan, including a visit to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and some other points of interest. The cathedral is a magnificent house of worship, well worth the effort to get there from more commonly trod parts of Manhattan. (The cathedral also inspires crackpots. One web site I saw warns the world that "the cathedral tricks unsuspecting church goers into its occult house of worship," run by the masons. Ah, those masons.)

The three-ton bronze doors of the cathedral, which are works by Henry Wilson, and the Rose Window above the door, are justly famous. My photography of those famed features didn't turn out so well. But I did like this shot of some of the stonework around the doors, scanned in black and white. An assortment of saints, I assume.

If I've read my sources correctly, the work only dates from the 1990s, when British stonemasons came over to train Americans in the art for the purpose of continuing work on this famously unfinished cathedral. (Masonry being a lost art in the United States. Unless the masons secretly control everything.)

Item From the Past: Grant's Tomb

On Saturday, I could sit out on the deck and eat lunch, and then read, without thinking about how various parts of me were getting cold. On Sunday, I could do it again. So I did. How often does this happen in November? Just about never.

But there have been a good number of good walking days in November, as opposed to sitting around outside. On Sunday, November 5, 2000, I had a fine walk around parts of Manhattan that were new to me, including the Columbia University campus, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and this structure:

It's Grant's Tomb, a remarkable edifice, and officially the General Grant National Memorial in Riverside Park. According to the National Park Service, "Approximately 90,000 people from around the world donated over $600,000 towards the construction of Grant's Tomb. [In big, fat 1890s dollars, mind you.] This was the largest public fundraising effort ever at that time. Designed by architect John Duncan, the granite and marble structure was completed in 1897 and remains the largest mausoleum in North America. Over one million people attended the parade and dedication ceremony of Grant's Tomb on April 27, 1897."

A Lost View

Wherever I go, I look for a view from something tall. Late in the summer of 1983, I couldn't pass up the World Trade Center for a view of New York. I was impressed by the view all around, but of course my recollection is a little fuzzy after a quarter-century, and I took no pictures and made no notes. It was a sunny day, and there was a fair amount of wind. This amateur video, despite its technical flaws, captures a tourist's sense of the experience on a bright summer day pretty well.

More memorable, actually, was the view from the Empire State Building, which I saw at night both times. I also visited the site of the World Trade Center when the scar was still pretty fresh, in early June 2002. I attended a panel discussion at on a middle floor of Two World Financial Center, which had a view of the 16-acre pit that had once been the twin towers.

"It was hard to visualize that anything had been there," I wrote at the time. "It looks like a vast construction site -- broad & deep. Men & earthmovers set the scale: they were tiny, the hole in the ground was enormous. The panel discussion was about the cleanup of the site & redevelopment plans. Most interesting were the engineers who worked on the cleanup."

Item from the Past: The Bronx, 1983

August 29, 1983

Last full day in New York. In the early morn I decided to see the Bronx Zoo and the NY Botanical Gardens. Eventually I did so, but it took me a while to get out of 17D [the apartment where I was staying]. On the way, I took the wrong subway, but the detour wasn't without its rewards. At one of the stations, I saw part of the filming of a music video, complete with stereotypical punk costumes, a camera and cameraman, and a woman squatting near a boombox, operating the tunes. Extras were standing around, and a makeup woman with a box of paints powder-puffed the musicians every now and then. I didn't recognize anyone involved, or any of the songs.

Before long I was on the #5 IRT, which after leaving Manhattan becomes an elevated train and gave me a full look at the wasteland that is the south Bronx. Blocks of rundown buildings are one thing, but what's astonishing is how few buildings stand on many blocks, and how much rubble there is. I've never seen the aftermath of a city shelled by an enemy, but I'd think it would look like this place.

Arrived at 180th Street and found the zoo without any trouble. I was expecting a more cage-oriented zoo, but was pleasantly surprised -- it's mostly fields and few cages, with a river running through it too. It also had a fine collection of animals, as zoos should, with only one annoying habit: it seemed like each and every sign describing the animals also waxed tendentious about how MAN as the vile enemy of all that is good and natural (I exaggerate, but only a little). I see what they're getting at, but if you ask the zebra being chased by the lioness, he might cite a more immediate threat.

The Botanic Gardens was less given to lecturing its visitors, with simple name plates to describe its many plants. After a walk through the gardens, I rode back to Manhattan and bought half-price theater tickets at TIKT in Times Square for 'night, Mother at the John Golden Theater on 45th near 8th Ave. (There's also an Army recruiting station at Times Square; a nearby graffito says "Fight War, Not Wars.")

Pommes Frites, Wow

One more posting about New York as I found it in late October 2006. My friend Geof Huth, who knows many good places to eat in the city, gave me some good recommendations this time around. I was able to visit a couple of them, and also found a couple of other places that I can recommend to him and everyone else.

Geof’s Recommendations. Zerza, a Moroccan restaurant on East 6th St. near New York University, gives away free postcards that promise “Belly Dance, Hookah, Exotic Drinks” but all I got on a Sunday night was fine fava bean soup and a tasty chicken bastilla (a kind of pot pie) served by a fetching but fully clothed waitress. Probably the belly dancing is on special occasions, the hookah might be unlawful in public places in New York by now, and I didn't want to spend money on any exotic drinks, though I did order a Casablanca, a Moroccan beer.

I visited, but didn’t eat at, another recommendation: Molyvos, a well-appointed Greek restaurant on Seventh Ave. near Central Park. It so happened that the office of an editor I was visiting was around the corner from it, and he suggested, independently of Geof’s suggestion, that we go there. It was too early to eat, but not too early for a glass of Greek wine, a red whose name I didn’t write down, at the brilliant copper-colored bar (just the top, the rest was dark wood).

My recommendations. Gene’s Coffee Shop on East 60th St., where I had a hearty breakfast. A narrow deli-restaurant with all the right details, including a Greek proprietor in black pants, a white shirt and a redish tie.

Dervish, a Turkish restaurant on West 47th St. in a space that had probably been a saloon at one time, with a large bar and tiled floors. I had a lunch meeting with some other editors there and enjoyed the lamb and okra (etli bamya) lunch special.

En route to Zerza, I went down St. Mark’s Place (a block of East 8th St.) and headed down Second Ave. There are all sorts of places along that stretch, including the off-putting Hip Hop Grub – no one was in there – and a few doors down, a hole in the wall that sold Belgian-style French fries in paper cones. It was called, aptly, Pommes Frites.

I didn’t stop there that night, but remembered it a few nights later when we decided to eat something as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade wound down. We walked a number of blocks to get there, the streets swarming with more people than usual, many in costume, including one fellow dressed as Space Ghost who walked behind us for a few seconds, loudly proclaiming that some other Space Ghost he’d seen wasn’t the real Space Ghost, he was.

When we got to Pommes Frites there was a line out the door, but it moved quickly. For $4, you get a “regular” cone of fries – which is pretty large – and for a little more, one from among a selection of many sauces. Just like in Belgium. We ate them on the sidewalk just outside the place. I had Vietnamese pineapple sauce, which doesn’t sound like it would go with fried potatoes, but it does, because these were no ordinary spuds. Cyrus, member of the Alexander who was with nephew Dees and me, said they were the best fries he’d ever eaten, and I would have agreed, except that none could beat the memory of the cone I had in Belgium years ago. But these were very close.

Borat & KISS Come to Town

I went to New York to find out about Borat. Not really, but find out I did, unless you count the vague notion I had of him previously, based on reading something or other at sometime or other. My nephew and I happened to see David Letterman’s broadcast on October 30, and Sacha Baron Cohen in character happened to be a guest, talking up his movie.

He was funny. The movie clip was funny. I understand that those who would impose a never-offend/kindergarten-class standard on humor, and even Kazakhstani officials, have taken umbrage at his antics. Lighten up, I say, especially to the Kazakhstanis. We here in the USA are often misrepresented in the movies, very often in the ones we make ourselves, and we live with it.

Borat succeeded in making me aware of Borat and the movie, which was the purpose of him being on TV. But I’m not an impulsive teenager, so I didn’t rush out to see the movie on opening weekend, and odds are that I’ll consider seeing it in the theater but not actually do so – or not at full price if I do. Instead, I'll rent the DVD someday, where I get around to it. This is why many movies aren’t made for grownups.

Borat also had a “float” in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade. I know because I went with my nephew Dees and fellow Alexander band member Cyrus to see the parade from a spot on Sixth Ave. near 14th St. Good spectacle, once it got under way: mostly marchers in a wide array of costumes, but also bands and decorated vehicles, and best of all, enormous puppets on tall rods, carried along the parade route by a number of puppeteers each. My favorites were the dancing-skeleton puppets and the big pumpkins, lit somehow from the inside. A more comprehensive description of the parade is here, more than a single onlooker could possibly see – its photo selection is a “best of” selection of the many thousands of costumes on view over the years, I think.

A handful of Borats were riding in a Borat-themed truck; for all I know, Sacha Baron Cohen was among them. Elsewhere – and a lot of people in the audience were in costume – we saw a couple of other Borats. The truck, at least, counted as an advertisement, and there were other ad-vehicles in the parade as well. Most conspicuous was the KISS float. As it passed, I wondered whether actual KISS band members were involved, or if it were merely some kind of tribute. How would you know just looking at them? I looked it up later, and sure enough, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were riding on the vehicle, in town promoting a new box set. According to the AP, they were “grand marshals” of the parade. That might be fitting, but it didn’t seem like the kind of parade that needed that concept.

KISS is still around? I was never a fan, but of course I knew about them in their ’70s heyday. I would have thought by now that the forces of the KISS Army would have been defeated by the forces of Time, which defeats everyone eventually. But not yet, I guess. At least they have the advantage of not visibly aging in place, unlike, say, the Rolling Stones.

There wasn’t as much political content in the parade as I thought there would be, coming as it did a week before the election. But there was a large George W. Bush head on a pole, with a spool of paper coming out of his mouth that said, LIES HATE FEAR. Later, a fellow dressed like a peach but wearing a Bush mask came by, holding a sign that said, “I’m Peach Bush.” Must have seemed clever when he thought of it. More bizarrely still, a man carried a sign (his costume was forgettable, and I have forgotten it) that berated Madonna as a “cultural imperialist” for her recent foray in transnational adoption. The mind boggles. He might also be worried that the KISS Army is about to invade Africa, too.

Perfectly Preserved, Yet Gone

Trips, at least mine, have their major and minor goals. More than 23 years ago, a native New Yorker I knew suggested I visit the Cloisters, a re-created Old World monastery that also houses part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval collection. I thought that sounded like a good idea. It’s remote by Manhattan standards, up on the northwest corner of the island at a place called Fort Tryon Park. If you visit the Met, it’s no extra charge to see the Cloisters during the same day.

In the years since, I’d never made there. I seriously considered going this time, even planned to. But after wandering around the Met for about three hours, I decided I needed to go into the open air of Flushing Meadows Park instead of the Cloisters, so I still haven’t acted on my friend’s suggestion. So much for that minor goal.

Another minor goal of this trip, seeing the Starlight Roof, was considerably easier, since it was part of my conference hotel. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Starlight Roof was one of Manhattan’s top nightclubs, perched on one of the roofs of the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Ave. I discovered where it was last year, too late to seek out the room, which had been restored to its art deco glory not too many years before. This year I found the right elevator in the hotel and rode up to see it.

From a review of a 1951 Xavier Cugot show at the Starlight Roof, republished in bigbandsandbignames.com: “In many ways, the Starlight Roof is the Waldorf's most glamorous public room, with its tremendous grill-like ceiling with large sky-blue stars and myriad small ones blinking a constant welcome.”

Oh, man. The reviewer also heard the clank of glasses, smelled thick tobacco smoke, and saw Cugot and his band at close quarters. The place must have been alive. Compared to that moment, the Starlight Roof I saw was as animated as a stuffed moosehead. It’s a pretty room, certainly, and the grill-like ceiling has been restored to its original self after being Eisenhowered sometime after the Cugot show. I saw no sky-blue stars, but maybe they still come out when the room is dark.

This pretty much captures the Starlight Roof as it is in the 2000s, from the hotel’s web site: “Providing a dramatic backdrop for award presentations, stockholders' meetings and annual conferences, the Starlight Roof is synonymous with success. An unmatched array of technological accoutrements and world-class meeting professionals assure that every event is as triumphant as the impression it conveys.”

Ho-hum. As far as I could see, there was nothing – no artfully hung photos of big names at the Starlight, no tasteful plaques, nothing – to acknowledge that the room was once a high-class jazz joint. Now it’s just a posh place to put people to sleep, rather than to keep them awake.

Balto

Capital day for the National Democracy, eh? But I won’t be sidetracked by electoral politics except to say that I wish that the Democratic Party were still informally called the National Democracy or merely the Democracy. They’ve got that robust, Jacksonian ring to them.

A few more park details. Flushing Meadow Park has a couple of rockets. Rather, the New York Hall of Science, a museum at the edge of the park, has a Redstone and an Atlas rocket standing next to each other within its grounds, behind a fence but almost fully visible from the parking lot. They’re topped off with the appropriate capsules, a Mercury for the Redstone and a Gemini for the Atlas. I always enjoy a chance to see rockets.

All together the park was pleasant enough, green space with sidewalks here and there among trees, but hasn’t got the feeling of a great Olmstead-planned space like Central Park or Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which I visited in ’02 and found to be a jewel seemingly disregarded by Manhattanites, but clearly enjoyed by Brooklynites.

I did visit Central Park this time around as well. The park is so large that it’s possible to make many visits, as I have, and still see new things each time. I have to like a place like that. This time I made it as far as the Great Lawn – which looked very familiar as the site of moviemaking, I think – and Turtle Pond, which, with its birds and cattails and such, is unremarkable except for the fact that it’s surrounded by millions of people.

Early in my amble through the Central Park I happened upon the bronze statue of Balto the Wonder Dog, which is perched on a bolder and gazes nobly into the distance. He’s also been rubbed shiny in spots. Dog and Kennel magazine has this to say about Balto:

“Fans of the Tonight Show may recall host Johnny Carson occasionally referring to Balto the Wonder Dog in his monologues. The real Balto, however, was no joke. In 1925, Nome, Alaska, was ravaged by a diphtheria epidemic. Curtis Welch, the only physician in Nome, radioed an appeal for lifesaving anti-toxin serum. By the time he did, several children had died and others were ill with the highly contagious disease.

“The hospital at Anchorage had fresh serum to spare, but the only dependable way of getting it to Nome in the heart of winter was by a dog-sled relay. The anchor leg of the relay was run by Gunnar Kaasen, who had a team of seven Siberian huskies led by a magnificent malamute named Balto. After taking the serum from the dog-sled team, Kaasen traveled the final 100 miles to Nome, blinded by snow with nothing but his dogs' sure-footed instincts and courage to guide him. The serum arrived in time to halt the epidemic.

“Two years later Balto and the rest of Kaasen's team were sold to the Cleveland Zoo. After Balto had died in 1933, he was stuffed, mounted and put on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He was also memorialized by a statue that stands in New York City's Central Park.”

Don’t know how I missed Balto all these years. But there he stands, in bronze, more than 80 years after his immortal deeds, though the plaque in Central Park doesn’t use his name, only referring to “the indomitable spirit of the Sled Dogs.” Still, it’s sobering to realize that the memory of a sled dog now bronzed in New York and stuffed in Cleveland will probably outlast you.

A Wedge of Queens

My nephew, who is also Dees Stribling though with a different rack of middle names, moved to Queens late this summer with the other members of his band, The Alexander. To be more exact – because Queens covers about 113 square miles – they live in on 48th St. in Woodside, a couple of blocks away from the intersection of 48th St. and 48th Ave. If I learned nothing else during this trip about the geography of Queens, I learned that the borough could use some streets names, as opposed to numbers.

My taxi driver from LaGuardia only had a vague idea of Queens geography too, asking me a couple of times en route, where is it [meaning the address, not Queens itself]? He was also holding another conversation in his native language, a Middle Eastern tongue, while working on the problem of where to take this odd fare who hadn’t asked for anything normal like a Midtown hotel. I made another call to the world headquarters of The Alexander (that is, my nephew’s apartment) to ask about cross streets, and before too long we got where I was going. The ride cost $15, which at least was cheaper than going to a usual-suspect Midtown hotel.

The Alexander occupy a three-bedroom flat that takes up all of the second story of one of a long row of two-story brick buildings up and down that block of 48th St. The buildings are jammed as tightly together as possible, forming a continuous façade along the block, with enough trees here and there to make crunching piles of leaves on the sidewalks this time of year. Occasional graffiti marks the walls, but not nearly as much as other places. It isn’t an ugly block, but it’s not made of the aesthetic brownstones of New York lore either.

The block is peculiar because it's within a triangle formed by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Long Island Expressway, which meet just to the east, with the base of the triangle being the enormous New Cavalry Cemetery to the west. The view from the back window of the apartment is tombstones stretching way far away; the sound of cars and trucks zooming along is never absent all along the block.

About a half a mile away is a shopping district focused around the MTA station called 46th-Bliss St., and of all the possible parts of Queens I could have visited, I spent the most time passing to and from this area. When the B24 bus comes in a timely way near The Alexander’s apartment, it’s short ride to the train station, which is an elevated at that point, not a subway. Otherwise, it’s a 15-minute walk to the station, not bad in warm weather. All along the way it’s a small-building neighborhood, a dense mix of apartments, shops and businesses. The sort of neighborhood in which a car isn’t remotely necessary.

The neighborhood is heavily, but not completely, Hispanic, many Central Americans I understand, but I didn’t have time to investigate the demographics too closely (and especially the restaurants inspired by distant homelands). I’m sure my nephew and his friends will come to know the area in detail before they move on. How fortunate they are, to be new to such an intense urban environment.

Item from the Past: New York, 2000

Had a good visit to New York, though I was on the verge of being sick most of the time. I flew in late Saturday the 4th and checked into the Paramount Hotel, which is just off Broadway up at 46th Street, the heart of Broadway. The hotel was clearly an older one that had been renovated with rooms mostly like mine, small but tidy.

It looked like the owners had turned a decorator loose in the hotel with the instructions to make it moderne la a 30s and 40s, but not spend too much on the process. One touch included colored light bulbs in the elevators, a different one in each. One more touch, probably accidental, was that at all times down in the lobby, there seems to be guys dressed completely in black, just hanging out.

That first evening I had a decent but not stellar barbecue dinner at a place called Texas Texas, a few blocks from the hotel, on Broadway at the north end of Times Square, which, even until late, is as crowded as a theme park — which some people compare it to. It’s quite different than in the early 1980s; the city has, famously, cleaned it up. No complaints from me about that. Nearby, 8th Avenue in Midtown hasn’t especially been cleaned up, reminding me, with its dank little shops, crummy sidewalks and throngs of people, of some of the cities of southeast Asia.

On Sunday morning I rode the subway northward to the area of Columbia University. Though not landscaped much, Columbia does indeed have weighty buildings and the feel of an important university. Not far away is the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the Episcopal see for New York, and a massive Gothic edifice besides. I looked around there quite a while, and stayed for a high-church service that included a visit by one of the local bishops and some baptisms.

Afterwards I walked to Grant’s tomb, which is officially known as the General Grant National Memorial, and run by the park service. I understand that it's been renovated recently, and it looks it — the marble skin, for instance, is a stunning white. Inside, the Grants lie downstairs, and there are a handful of exhibits on the ground level, and one park service employee without much to do. The tomb is located in Riverside Park, a long strip of land overlooking the Hudson River.

Then I took a bus southward. We had to detour because of the New York marathon, and eventually I ended up near where I’d thought of going, the Metropolitan Museum. I’d spend the better part of a day in that one in August 1983, but it’s very large and worth another look. But by this time — 3 in the afternoon — I was more than a little tired, and so I opted for something smaller: the Guggenheim Museum.

The building is an eccentric Frank Lloyd Wright design, a spiral with exhibit rooms jutting off in one direction. Makes you wonder if it was a kind of joke on New York by Wright, whom I’ve read didn’t care for the city much. Still, the exhibits were good. The main temporary show was devoted to six female Russian painters active before 1917 — their takes on Impressionism, Cubism, etc.

Monday and Tuesday I was at my NY office most of the time, though Monday night I had a fine dinner of sushi at a place my managing editor recommended. It was very much like being in Japan, except for the customers. After that, I took the subway to Greenwich Village and walked around. I enjoyed a visit to a jam-packed used book store there, the kind I don’t visit much any more, unfortunately.

On Tuesday evening, I caught an evening flight home. Just as I was getting ready to board, the TV at the gate (CNN, I believe) made the first of the now-infamous Florida predictions: Florida for Gore. The crowd was unusually interested in the TV at the gate that night. I thought there would be a winner by the time I got to Chicago, but of course that didn’t happened.

Khyber Pass

Usually I don’t link with other web sites except to illustrate a point, but in the case of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism I think I’ll make an exception. Good for a few grins.

Around this time last year, I visited a Tibetan restaurant called Tsampa in the East Village on the recommendation of my friend Geof Huth, who visits New York City more often than I do (see Oct. 7 & 8, 2004). This year, I didn’t have any special recommendation in mind for lunch on Friday, but I thought I’d go to roughly the same neighborhood as I did then, walk around, and find something that looked interesting.

That kind of strategy doesn’t always work. But luck was with me. I rounded the corner from 2nd Avenue onto St. Mark’s Place, which is really a continuation of East 8th Street, and jammed restaurants, bars, shops and small businesses with offbeat appeal, mainly but not only for youth. I’ve read that the street was once a good deal seedier, and that people complain of its gentrification, as if an urban area can’t be interesting and relatively safe at the same time.

Almost immediately I saw Khyber Pass, an Afghan restaurant at 34 St. Mark’s, small old building sporting a few caryatids. A brief look at the menu, and that decided it. Inside it seemed dark at first, but that was only my reaction to going from sunshine to dark wood floors, red walls and dim lights. All sorts of things hung on those walls, including rugs, plates, musical instruments I took for Afghan, tassels and a large print of the famous National Geographic cover photo of the Afghan girl with the haunting eyes. There was also, oddly, a cuckoo clock on a far wall, with a big brass samovar (idle-looking) nearby to keep it company.

I can remember visiting an Afghan restaurant only once before, about 20 years ago, a place on the North Side of Chicago near Belmont Blvd., long gone now. Much later I learned that it was owned by relatives of Mohammed Karzai. I vaguely remember it being exotically good.

For an appetizer, I ordered mantoo, a steamed dumpling filled with beef, onions and various spices, topped with a yogurt sauce, which went very well with the mint tea I was drinking. It was shaped something like ravioli. Afghanioli, maybe.

The menu described shireen palow as “an exotic rice dish cooked with orange peels, saffron, almonds and pistachios, served with charcoal-grilled Cornish game hen.” The meat was plenty tasty, but the saffron rice with a strong orange favor outdid it by a culinary mile. Worth going to the Khyber Pass to eat.

Poetry in the Zoo

After an early afternoon lunch with my editor last Wednesday, I had a few hours to kick around, combined with the ambition to walkabout in Manhattan. What I didn’t have was energy. I’d gotten up very early to catch my flight, without the luxury of going to bed early the night before.

So from West 56th Street between 5th and 6th avenues, I made it as far as the Midtown-facing side of Central Park. At least the weather was good. In fact, it was flawlessly dry and warm. Somehow, in the dozen times I’ve visited New York, I’ve almost always had good walking weather, even in August or November. Then again, I’ve never been in January or February.

Last week the park was still very green, with just a dash of fall. Just inside the park, next to Central Park South, is an imaginatively named body of water, the Pond, which has a bright green surface these days. Pond scum, I thought. Not pond scum, all passersby are told by signs, but eco-friendly duckweed. Probably the Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park on behalf of the city, got tired of people complaining about the pond scum.

Near the Pond is the Central Park Zoo. It was just the thing: not far away, not too large, and new to me. I like zoos anyway, sometimes even better when there are no children to shepherd around. The Central Park Zoo is exceeding handsome, completely rebuilt according to a Kevin Roche design in the 1980s, with a lot of brickwork and plantings. It’s divided as the Earth is, into temperate, arctic, and tropical zones—the latter two formed (mostly) by indoor exhibits, while the temperate exhibits were outdoors, taking advantage of New York’s temperate location.

Wandering around, I saw penguins, puffins and polar bears in the arctic chambers; otters, red panda, marsh turtles and snow monkeys in the temperate zone; and a selection of colorful birds, including the remarkable white-fronted amazon in the tropics. Believe me, those Google images do it no justice.

Before long, I started to notice the poetry posted near the animal habitats. Besides the usual zoological information provided on signs, the zoo has also erected permanent signs offering verse to visitors. Generally, the lines had something to do with animals, though sometimes only tangentially.

Famous poets were represented: Sappho, Auden, Frank O’Hara, among others. There was a cross-section of poems translated from other languages as well: Spanish, an Inuit tongue, haiku by Issa, and more. Reading about these signs when I got home, I discovered that they were installed only this year. I’ve never seen anything like them at a zoo.

In the temperate zone, I spotted a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called “Famous”—white letters on green Plexiglas, very aesthetically done. By golly, seeing that did me good. She’s a San Antonio poet who visited my high school English class one day in 1978 to read some poems. I think, but do not remember for certain, that she actually attended my high school before my time there (she would have been a new college grad in ’78). I didn’t write “Famous” down, but I did read it all, with considerable enjoyment.

I fed “river fish famous Nye” into Google this evening, and sure enough there it was:

Famous

By Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and is not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Grandma’s Legal Troubles

Overheard on the streets of Manhattan last week, when one young man said to another near the entrance of the Pickwick Arms Hotel on 51st: “… his grandma was indicted. Yeah, she had power of attorney over everything…”

Does this reflect on the character of New York’s elderly population? I doubt it. But there’s a story of family problems out there somewhere that I’m glad I have nothing to do with.

Last week I found myself on 51st Street, and various other streets on that famous island, and for a good reason, namely that I was being paid to be there. I suggested to an editor I know a while ago that I cover a real estate conference at the InterContinental Hotel in Midtown for his web site. He said yes, so early on Wednesday last week—very early, before dawn—I boarded a Metra train here in Schaumburg, then caught the CTA line downtown to Midway, where I caught a somewhat late ATA flight to LaGuardia. After that, it’s an airport limo (that is, a bus) to Midtown.

An everyday marvel, waking up near one city and bedding down the same day in another. But the real marvel was the cost of transport, Chicago to New York. Metra: $3.50. CTA: $1.75. ATA, one way, taxes etc. included: $72.50. Airport limo, LaGuardia to Grand Central: $12. So slightly under $90 each way. One night in my shoebox hotel room cost more than half again as much, but I can understand the economics of high hotel prices in Manhattan, which is short on space. What mystifies me is how ATA can afford to haul me through the sky for about 12.3¢ per air mile (800 divided by the base price of $65). But I don’t need to understand it.

Over three days and two nights, I met editors and I went to the conference. I took notes and I wrote a couple of articles on a borrowed laptop. But of course that’s not what I’m going to write about here. I managed to squeeze a couple of good walks out of the deal, and see a few new things. This is very easy to do in New York, city of limitless detail.