Down In The Dumps

West 91st Street: Another quiet afternoon in the 'hood.

Verse Reverse

In February I saw the play Grace, starring Lynn Redgrave at the Lucille Lortel Theater. It's a scalding emotional drama (Redgrave was amazing) about how a mother with a public reputation as an atheist reacts to her son's announcement that he is becoming an Anglican priest. In an interesting twist in the story, the son's fiancée recites the poem This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin. I have always liked that poem. It's ostensibly about what breeding does to human beings, but I think it's really about the twisted psychological manipulations parents resort to to stay sane and in control around their children. The child eventually grows up to view its parent as the cause of their own fuckings-up. Since I got over my Oedipal/Electra complexes, I have thought Larkin's poem is unfair to parents, in most cases, and here is my retort.

This Be The Reverse

They’re not so bad, your mum and dad,

For having made someone like you.

They did their best with what they had,

Despite the hell you put them through.

And in their turn they may have sworn

At their old folks as you now do.

Those whom in silence they now mourn

And say you bear resemblance to.

We make our misery day by day

And blame our parent's mental health

Get to a church and start to pray

Your own kids don’t become yourself

Water tanks

There are two companies left in the city that build and maintain water towers, Rosenwach and Iseek Brothers. I guess they don't exist in other cities but here you see them everywhere.

From my roof, I can see about twenty of them standing silently over the city. They are used to deliver water to the upper floors of buildings that are too tall to use regular city water, which is only under enough pressure to go up five or six stories. (Picture a broken fire hydrant.) Buildings pump city water to the roof and it flows down again under force of gravity.

The tanks are basically large barrels made of wood. You have to have them inspected and cleaned once a year and it's probably worth it. A crew climbs up and cleans it out and inspects the seams. The roof keeps dirt and birds out, though I have heard there are sometimes dead pigeons inside, probably one those myths like alligators in the sewers.

Just Another Day on the Subway

This is what I mean about being so used to the strange or bizarre in the city that you don't notice it even when it is sitting across from you on the subway. These are 5 cent deposit cans tied to a tray busing cart that itself is mounted with a tall metal rack. The owner of all this was asleep behind the pile. What's amazing is that to get here, he must have dragged it all down at least two flights of stairs, through a turnstile and onto a subway car. I was headed uptown with two friends when I saw it. We sat across from him even though there were plenty of seats at the other end of the car. When we got off at 125th Street, I stopped to take this photo and my friends asked me what I was doing. They hadn't given it much notice and wondered why I would be interested in it.

Woman Cab Jumps Blogger Twice in One Day

I got cab jumped by the same woman twice in one afternoon. What is cab jumping? It is when you are standing on the corner hailing a taxi and someone steps in front of you up the block and picks off the cab that you thought you were going to get. People see you waiting and slyly walk up the sidewalk ahead of you to grab the next taxi that comes along, just as is happening in this photo. Both of these guys slipped out in front of the woman even though she was clearly there first. Sometimes it's unintentional, but usually it's blatant.

It happened to me yesterday when I was standing at 114th Street and Broadway at the Farmers' Market in front of Columbia U. I had too many bags to manage on the bus, so I took a position on the downtown side of Broadway and waited for a taxi. As is typical, several had just passed and now there were none. A couple of minutes, though, and one came over the hill at 116th Street in my direction. Just as it crossed 115th Street, a woman stepped from between two cars in the middle of the block and raised her hand. The cab, my cab stopped and she nonchalantly hopped in. It is so annoying when this happens, but what are you going to do. About a minute later another cab pulled up so I grabbed it.

Not so fast. Before I could pick up my many bags and go for the trunk, this second taxi darted across the intersection to the the opposite corner. I was, like, what the f---? I turned around to see the same woman who had snatched my cab up the street getting into this cab. For whatever reason, she had dumped the first cab and was now pinching another one from me. I was angrier at the driver than her, though. I noted his license number, 8C73, and began mentally composing a nasty complaint to be emailed to the TLC. Finally, a third cab came and I hurried in.

The city wants taxi drivers to put in GPS systems and offer credit card service which will cost them each a bundle to install and maintain for the convenience of their mostly ungrateful customers. A lot of cabbies are striking in protest. By the time I got home, my Russian driver and I talked about how bad an idea this is because it's a tough living. We had a couple of laughs about his tip and I forgot about my complaint to the TLC.

Parking on the Upper West Side

Parking is tight here because most of the buildings in the neighborhood were built before parking garages were common. There are probably more old carriage houses and stables on the Upper West Side than parking garages. People will do almost anything for a parking space on the street. I once found my car pushed over the curb into a tree pit by somebody trying to make enough space for themselves behind it. That got me a $50 ticket (which was reversed on appeal in mail-in traffic court.) To keep things moving, the city imposes alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules. If you are unfamiliar with this idea, it means you can't park in this neighborhood on something like Tuesdays and Fridays on the south or east side of the streets between 9:30 and 11 am or on Mondays and Thursdays on the north or west side between... you get the picture. They do this so the city can clean the streets. This has created a whole club of donut turners who sit in their cars holding the best spaces until the street sweeper drives up behind them, blows its horn to wake them up, they start the car and and do a donut to go from in front of the sweeper to its backside before anyone else can swoop in and take their space. Within one minute after the end of alternate side hours, every space is taken and one would never know that anything had even changed. Other drivers squeeze into what few impossible spaces are left for them.

Greetings from the Upper West Side

The Upper West Side is home to many beautiful places and people. There are also a lot of crazy things that go on here, some of them ordinary Manhattan crazy, others specific to the neighborhood. You can't go looking for them. They come to you, but if you have been around for any length of time, you may not even notice them anymore. Then one day when you happen to be with a with a friend from out of town it will all come back to you when you realize from the dumbfounded look on their face that you just witnessed something incredible. I hope to put lots of things about the UWS, from its beauty to its funnier side, into this blog.