Two Dishes But To One Table

Looking to Raise a Farewell Mug in Federalist Era New York This Thursday

When I had to choose a meeting place for a drink this week I focused on something that would match the Henry James novel I'm reading.  The action of the novel takes place in 1840s New York and I was pleased to suggest to my friends that we meet in a building from the Henry James era.

The 1820's structure shown below was built by a black war veteran who ran a tobacco importing business from the first floor.  It is now the home of the Ear Inn, so named by some fellows who wanted to avoid the tax fee of registering a new business name and so simply painted over part of the letter B in the neon BAR sign out front in the 1970s.

The entire structure was condemned in 1906 but somehow it all survived and I'm meeting two friends for a "goodbye to New York" drink at the Ear Inn on the first floor this week before moving to Madison, Wisconsin.   Look in the photo at how the poor building  cowers amidst the new construction (it's the smaller building, behind the tree). 

How great to have a landmark place to satisfy a dual historical appetite for both gritty Koch Era / Taxi Driver era NYC and also Henry James era NYC at the same time!

There is more info on the Wikipedia page for the James Brown House.

Wisterias Line My Manhattan Stair Street

The bedrock underlying Manhattan is  tenacious enough that many streets north of Harlem and far into the Bronx end in stairways.  The precipitous topography outlived efforts to dynamite it.

My block has a few flights of cement pedestrian steps where Pinehurst Street gets too steep to be a road.  This stretch of stairs is dominated each April by a large 15 year old Wisteria vine.  The Garden club put a sign up to describe it:

"This beautiful wisteria vine came from a 6" plant grown from seed by the late Sona Kunter.  It survived the 2001-2002 reconstruction of the steps and garden because Sona stopped by every day to remind the workers to take care of it.     Please don't pick the flowers -- they don't survive off the vine!"

Downtown has a rich assortment of venerable vines too, e.g. the vine photo at Matthew Schiavello blog.

 

 

Between the Lions

Imagine the mutual thrill: I bumped into a woman at the church potluck who turned out to be a retired career librarian from the Mid-Manhattan NYPL branch, a veteran of one of the world's great libraries and an enthusiastic patron of that library.  She was happy to talk and I was happy to listen; she had lots to lament and I had lots to ask. 

Bitter at her forced retirement, one of this librarian's vindications was that The Nation published a critique last month of the NYPL's modernization strategy. 

The trend at our library here, as elsewhere, is toward's "efficiency", a term which seems to mean hiring expensive conusultants who recommend firing the best staff members and comoebsating the CEO to the tune of $800,000 a year, plus perks, such as a Park Avenue apartment and scholarships for his children.  There is a push at the NYPL to dissolve the rare and unique parts and turn it into a series of small, ordinary neighborhood lending libraries. The main building, the landmark structure built in the era of Carnegie philanthropy, is to be maintained as a visual tourist attraction but cleansed of its collections. 

The Nation article is a little long.  I plan to read it on the train home from the Riverside NYPL branch now.

From 2006

I just saw from a referrer that Two Dishes is an authority on the subway candy kids -- a very NYC topic -- .  (Link at MetaFilter).

An Urge to Prune

A Japanese Pagoda tree is rubbing against our second story window.

I have the urge to climb it and trim it, right there on 181st Street.  You're allowed to do that in New York City.  The parks department gives you a 4 hour training course and then issues a card that gives you carte blanch (vert?) to go hack the unruly trees on your street.

It's striking to me how in my middle years I don't seem to do new things so much as revisit activities of my youth.  In this case, tree trimming was my job from 1987-1988.  It's now become a hobby.  Here's a cherry tree I trimmed in March of this year in gratitude for being hosted out in East Hampton.

 

Best Thing All Week

I sprinted for 150 feet alongside a rat last night, sometimes passing him up.  It was really, really cool.  They're usually so evasive, this came as a sort of ambition realized.  I feel like I dreamed it.  I'll have to ask Meg when she gets up if it was real.

(animated .gif by Karrakas)

Busking Review: Saxophones(2) and Drum

Ladies were loving the trio Hooch Dog the other day.  I was loving them but only because they were playing in the subway.   Their busking rate of dollar aquisition was 2 dollars per minute during the short time I observed them. They had about a dozen white female art school types enthralled it seemed on the Brooklyn-bound side of the L-Train platform at 6th Avenue.  Just to get a handle on how large their target demographic is at that station, consider this: that's the subway stop for Parsons, Pratt-Manhattan, The New School AND (sort of) NYU!

I gave a buck too, not for the twin saxophones but for the great drumming.   Dude was definitely making the most of his one snare + one high-hat kit.   How does Hooch Dog sound?  In the subway they had the crowd on it's feet, rocking out with some simple, driving riffs.  On record (stream Hooch Dog here free or buy for a buck) they are more tuneful.   They compared well to my only reference point in this genre, is that other drum and sax trio, Bazooka, long gone.

Riding Risky

Finally!  A bike blogger, Kevin at Urban Peleton, that is in favor of stopping at stop signs and riding down a one way street in the right direction:

"I began to recognize the importance of being sensitive to the rules of the road. It’s funny, the lycra set and the messenger wanna-be set seem to be in the same camp on this one; either they can’t be bothered to slow down for too long or they simply refuse to comply with authority. What they fail to comprehend is that the bike lanes are no different than the sidewalks. You don’t run down the sidewalk at top speed, weaving in and out of the crowds as if you’re in some Hollywood thriller. You also don’t run out into traffic dodging cars to get to the other side."

In the style of the white bike memorials I want to post some on street marker a la the Darwin Awards as a tribute to bikers who darted out against the signal and were eliminated from the gene pool.  

I had an indignant friend, riding the wrong way around a corner, at night, on a busy road, yell at a law obeying taxi.  I had no success telling them the taxi was right and he was wrong.  

Here are the White Bike memorials: one, two.

Here's more of URBAN PELETON.

Tribute to a 47 Year Old Calder Sculpture

When I walk by Alexander Calder's 'Boxoffice' sculpture I often stop, sometimes circle it, and sometimes, like today, sit down and think about it for awhile. (Photos by me, today.)

I like that 'Boxoffice' is:

o   intensely monochromatic, both to emphasize the lines and also so it becomes a blank screen to project other textures onto

o   of a height to permit walking through it, even by people who are ignoring it and have no idea they are encountering the awesome

o   viewable from many angles and so different from the different angles that there is no way the viewer or even the creator (though certainly The Creator)  will be able to rationally record and summarize the appearance, so that each viewing will become a fleeting experience that only exists completely in the present, utterly unable to be preserved or replayed at a later date

Only after knowing it for a long time have I noticed that 'Boxoffice' has:

o   in the midst of the simplicity, unexpected details distinct enough to be obviously there by design but still subtle enough to not be noticed on the first viewing.:a vocabulary of flat pieces except for one that is strangely bent,  a sharp peak at the top, not so obvious as to be overlooked on the first viewing, or a waver to one of the edges, almost like your hand slipped while drawing it, but tantalizingly evocative of some shape you were basing it off of and that we are forbidden to ever know, as unknowable to the viewer as the eleventh dimension of the suspected superstrings of atomic physics

o   ephemeral lines weightless when first sketched on paper but ultimately  realized in tons of rolled iron plate, reeking of the foundry.

o   the honesty of visible seams, both welded and bolted.  

Boxoffice is kind of a sibling to Calder's The Baron, a sculpture outside my first chemistry department in DeKalb's Northern Illinois University.

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There's a photo of the artist with Boxoffice here.  A Newark blogger encountered this sculpture and took many photos of the entire surrounding plaza here.   And there's an odd blog I found while looking for Calder connections here.

Sibelius Hymn

We have just finished our second full week of classes.  I'm teaching chemistry and Regents chemistry this year.  Last Friday was our first lab, "Is a Candle Flame Matter?"  It is based on Michael Faraday's 1861 Christmas lectures for young people.  My favorite part of that one is taking a little scrap of window screen and placing it sideways in the middle of the flame.   It reveals the flame has the appearance of a hollow bubble:

If anyone wants to investigate a candle too here is what I typed up.  As usual, it's a first go; hopefully improve the instructions next time.  Download 08_lab_The_Candle

Saturday Meg and I used Google Earth to fly over to Madagascar.  I just started with GE at 12000 feet, pointed at my house, and spun the globe.  We flew (virtually) over featureless blue water for about two minutes noting the longitude.  When the latitude hit 50 degrees east with no landfall I knew I had mis-aimed.  We finally hit land amidst excellent coral reefs.  Stepping back to 20,000 feet we saw we were in an archipelago.  Finally, zooming way back we saw we had flown right beneath the Cape and had hit Indonesia!  We turned around and went back, finding S. Africa this time and from there setting out over the water to Madagascar.   The real hunting began then, as Meg had never considered what her daily routine among the dirt roads on her peninsula might look like from the air.   After 15 minutes we caught significant landmarks in the following order:  the beach, the market, the Catholic church, the much smaller Lutheran church.  Here is where Meg lived in the mid-nineties:

Finally on Sunday, I got all weepy at church.  The minister directly addressed the bigotry that is spreading about the Park 51 Muslim Center.  She tied our current situation in to the Old Testament lesson for the day, the one where Moses causes God to "change his mind" about the Israelites  and their golden calf.    The service closed with an excellent hymn to a Sibelius tune that I'd never heard before, from the chapter titled "National Songs".  It had the lines:

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine...

Complete hymn text at Prometheusli.