Gateless

Picture from http://www.planetware.com/picture/new-york-city-new-york-statue-of-liberty-us-nyc005.htm

I’ve blogged on this subject before here and here. In fact I guess this is sort of an annual thing. Anyway, my readers won’t be surprised by what I have to say today regarding everything involving tomorrow’s anniversary.

What will shock my readers is that I’ve actually made a blog entry for the first time in four months. More on that another time.

As I’ve said before. I live here in New York City. I’ve lived here just about my entire life. I lived here before the Twin Towers were visible and lived with them as they dominated the city land and sky-scape.

Nine years later it is still strange to me to look out and not see them from various spots in the city. From West 4th Street and 6th Avenue, to the Smith and 9th street stop on the G and F train in Brooklyn, from the Staten Island Ferry to the Ditmars Blvd stop on the N train in Queens. Nine years later there is still something not there that ought to be there.

I remember my last visit to the Observation Deck at the World Trade Center with my then 10 year old daughter as we looked out at the Liberty Science Museum, Long Island, Upstate New York and of course Manhattan Island.

For those of us that live here, we are constantly reminded. The skyline itself is an empty echo of the thousands of lives contained in those steel marvels of engineering. The many more thousands of lives left behind in loss and pain.

As I’ve pointed out, I somehow escaped personal heartache on that day. No one I directly know was amongst the murdered. But many I do know have lost lovers, friends, husbands, fathers and children. Every moment I talk to them on the phone, or see them on Facebook or have a cup of coffee I am reminded. Every waking day, they are reminded.

My heartache is for the heartache of those I care about and of course for the scar on the city for which I have a love/hate relationship and with which an indelible part of my soul will always belong.

It’s also no secret that aesthetically, I hated those buildings. While marvels of engineering they seemed out of place at the time. And I still feel that way about them then.

But now…

Like them or not, they were unforgettable, powerful and a kind of gateway to the city. A gateway this city no longer has.

The Statue of Liberty no longer stands in the shadow of that gate. A gate that increasingly seems to remain closed to what America is. There was a kind of sense of the Statue of Liberty showing her light to the harbor as she stood at the feet of the Gate that was the Twin Towers. A Gate now closed.

Liberty still shines a light onto the harbor, her words of welcome still inscribed. But God forbid you want to build a community center aimed at healing that gaping wound. God Forbid you make a place that yes, is primarily a Muslim Cultural Center but that also will house places of prayer for every religious practice available. God Forbid that an act can be made to reach out, to bridge the divide.

Oh you’re welcome here, but only up to a point.

September 11th must be a day of reflection, prayer and thoughtfulness. However it is you observe for yourself and ponder the nature of humanity’s penchant for cruelty and violence to each other and what we can do to grow from it, to be greater than it. To be better than we have been.

No, instead we focus on whackjobs burning books of worship, we throw parties to make money and then retroactively decide to donate the proceeds somewhere and claim that the party date was a coincidence. We claim to be thinking of the families of the fallen when we display our astounding ignorance of every conceivable fact and meaning. We exploit and wring our hands, but God forbid we actually solve the issue and learn to live WITH each other.

Clearly I stand in support of the Cultural Center known as Park 51. But I will not be joining the demonstrations tomorrow. I do not believe that September 11th should be marching or demonstrating for anything. ANYthing.

Anything else dishonors the dead and dishonors the families of the dead, whether at the World Trade Center, The Pentagon or that open field in Shanksville.

We need reflection. We need to think. We need to pray and send light. We need to volunteer. We need to really help.


As always I say we don't need to be told to "Never Forget". That's a self aggrandizing phrase promoted by people who are trying to be part of something that frankly they.just.aren't.

What happened was yes, a national tragedy. But the wounds are felt HERE. Not in Wasilla, not in Florida....HERE.


Any idiot will tell you that if you keep scratching a wound it will get infected. We need to stop scratching at the wound.

This city has lost its nads....

"Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I would advise you not to invade"

Rick Blaine to Major Strasser. Casablanca. 1942

Alright...Last week I bitched about how this city has utterly lost it's ability to handle snow and I complained to Mayor Mike Bloomberg that we are becoming something other than New York City....

That was nothing...

Now...apparently because Mikey has whined about not wanting Khalid Sheikh Mohamad here...he's all afraid of the security risks and police situation and cost, blah blah blah...that we have to set aside what is GREAT about this nation...and this city and .

So let me get this straight Mikey....

It was okay to move our cops from various neighborhoods in NYC to Central Park for a month to protect these ugly pieces of shit. These traffic cone orange shower curtains that you could NOT get away from ANYwhere in Central Park. By the way...crime rates rose in certain neighborhoods because of the cop "migration"  TO PROTECT SHOWER CURTAINS!!!!!

Christos pretentious "Gates"

And it was ok to pull all the cops and spend a gazillion dollars so that The Republican Convention THESE YAHOOS could live on their cruise ship and waddle into Madison Square Garden in the afternoon for their convention...shutting down businesses. (NYC lost money on this one).

 I know, Tom Delay is missing. On purpose. I hate that guy too much to allow his face on my blog

Oh yeah...then you created "Free Speech Zones" Where protesters had to stay in cages...Yeah...that was sooooo brave, Mikey. And nothing expensive about that. (By the way, thanks Democrats for deciding this was a good idea for your convention too. Can we go back to the First Amendment now?)

Thank you bakelblog.com

But now...now...it's time for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to face the music.

This guy

This.......guy

Now, we are so afraid of KSM and his buddies, that Mikey is afraid to have him here...it's too expensive. Too expensive for the man. Maybe Mikey can dip into that 85 million he spent to narrowly win re-election last year. Maybe he can come up with the dough from his buddies to cover the costs...The feds offered help...no no...still to expensive...read...I'm afraiiid.

Maybe we as New Yorkers can stand tall and proud and tell the world that KSM WILL stand in a civilian criminal court, because that's all he is...a little petty fucking thug criminal. Maybe we can stand tall and show the world that we stand for the rule of law and we even respect the rights of fucktwats that help engineer the murder of thousands. We stand for these things because we are Americans, we are New Yorkers. It is who we are. 

Nope...it's who we were. We are the city that can't walk to the subway in the snow. We are the city that never lets our children out of sight even as it is safer now for children than it has ever been. We are the city that was understandably brought to our knees on September 11, 2001, yet almost nine years later, we are demonstrating that we are still on our knees. We are still unable to stand.  

We are afraid of another attack. I've got news for you, my Mayor and my fellow New Yorkers. We may be attacked again, we may not be. Whether we try this schmuck here or not won't change that. We're New York. Ask London, Ask Paris, Ask Belfast, Ask Khabul, Ask Bagdhad. If you're a target, you're a target. New York is a target. 

So....Really? We're really going to let these shitheads think they won? Have they won? Really?

Granted, Rick Blaine (nor the writers of that great classic) could not have imagined the horror of jetliners flying into towers. He was talking about Nazis marching down Delancey Street. But he was still addressing the spirit of this city. He was still talking about our resilience and defiance. The way we say "Fuck you" when we think we're getting screwed or insulted.

See what a great middle finger the Empire State Building makes?

We sit now, on our knees, afraid of another attack because we were going to try this guy rightfully. We were gonna be New York but instead, we are being who they made us. The President and the Justice Dept. are now reconsidering the plan to try KSM here and to move it to a military court because they can't get the cooperation of the city. So, Military Court. Different rules. Rules we don't need because this guy is guilty by his own admission, (despite the water-boarding). It isn't as though he had a real chance of getting off. We are afraid of another attack. We are afraid of our own laws. We are afraid of our own Constitution.

Nope...we are not New York anymore. Not Rick Blaine's New York, at least. Certainly not mine.

Really Mikey? Really?

Snowbigfuckindeal

In April of 1969 I was newly 7 years old. I was going to P.S. 116 on Menahan Street and Knickerbocker Avenue. We had a ginormous blizzard. So big that we could build snow tunnels from our stoops to the cars on the curb...It was amazing.

This storm is famous for how it crippled the city and how Mayor John Lindsay handled it so badly it nearly cost him re election. Parts of the outer boroughs of Queens and New York were inaccessible for over a week.

Back in the 90s we had a huge blizzards that lasted the entire winter because of El Nino. Seriously, both years. I believe 1995 and 1996 the last of the snow that melted in April had actually fallen the previous November. People didn't even bother trying to shovel out their cars after a couple of weeks because it was just going to get buried again.

You know what we still had then? During all those storms? All those years ago? With weaker technology and fewer resources?

SCHOOL! WORK!...nothing got closed. If you could show up, you did. You know why?

We have these modes of transportation in New York...had them for about a hundred years or so

They are called SUBWAYS. THEY RUN UNDERGROUND. They suck a lot...but THEY RUN. It's how we get from point A to point B in this town.

But something happened in the last couple of years and I don't know what the fuck it is. But we've started closing school pre emptively. We've started cowering in our apartments.


Hell, I was to go to an event this evening but the snow was so heavy they decided to cancel it. Except the snow wasn't that bad and about 5 minutes after the cancellation the SNOW STOPPED.

Dear New York City,

What the fuck happened to your balls? Get up off your ass, put on some motherfucking Totes boots and WALK through the goddam snow!!!!

Stop whining. Fer chrissakes, they are laughing at us in Buffalo. BUFFALO IS LAUGHING AT US. BUFFAFUCKINGLO!!!!!! Are we seriously going to let them deserve to deride us?!!!!!!

Mayor Bloomberg, I thought you grew up here...are you seriously making us act like whiney little children around a bit of frozen rain. Is this the city you want us to become?

It's bad enough Giuliani began to turn us into a giant shopping mall. Do you have to turn us into castrati to boot? I love the pedestrian areas and cutting traffic from parts of Midtown...but if the price we have to pay for this is we become an emasculated little weak bunch of whimpering sheep, I say bring back the trucks.

I hate winter, I don't like the cold, but you know what? I go out in it. You know why? I HAVE SHIT TO DO AND  A LIFE TO LIVE!

This isn't snow so deep you can't open your front door like they get in Iowa. This is not even a foot and a foot isn't even that hard.

IT'S.JUST.SNOW.

Get the fuck over it! Grow some nads!

BE NEW YORK....not....I don't know....fucking NEWARK.

(sigh)

My Sunday Walk, Part 4

Clearly on the Brooklyn side and past the river, the signs of "gentrification are impossible to miss. As you descend the walkway onto Broadway this stamp is frequent. It's a little late for the sentiment, the hipsters took Williamsburg over awhile ago. Some of the improvements have been just that, others have taken the personality out and turned Brooklyn into Greenwich Village Lite. But at least there's some place you can find a semblance of the Greenwhich Village that was. In the meantime, the city gets more and more expensive to live in.

The southern walkway descends quickly and you can see the exit signs for the southern roadway as we sink below rooftops. The cupola of the HSBC Bank ahead, I believe was once the actual Williamsburg Bank before the downtown Brooklyn clocktower.


Here we are...the odd rooftops and unique Brooklyn attitude. Fuckin aye, you name it, we got it.

You get to the bottom and here you find this awesome statue of George Washington off of Roebling Street. It's really strong and stunning to behold. Here is the NY Times article from its unveiling in 1906. It's a PDF, so you will need Acrobat Reader.

And now...on to the journey to Mexican Coke...

My Sunday Walk, Part 3

Blogger, apparently, insists that pics and text lay out so that it looks like comments are supposed to be above the picture. Fuck that, I don't work that way. I like pic comments on the bottom, so bear with me on the spacing in the wrong place.

Looking north into midtown Manhattan. It is really mind blowing to see it all out there and the vast sky beyond and above it. The East River is much more interesting and windy than most give it credit for. Technically its not really a river, but who cares.

The walkway FINALLY opens up and you can see the Tower fully and the sky above it. If you click on the pic you can get a better sense of the incredible steel work and its impressive height. Some might say that the reveal after all that overhead beaming is meant to be dramatic. If they do....they are wrong. I wasn't filled with a sense of dramatic awe. I was relieved to finally see what should be visible from the get go. I really would have ended up disliking the walk intensely over all if this hadn't happened.

These are southern views. The first shows how sharply the river turns west. At a certain angle, it seems that the river is stopped suddenly. Oddly beautiful, especially when crossing the bridge toward Brooklyn at night when its all lights and darkness. Then you turn and see the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges in the distance. I love this aspect of the view.

The J Train on its way to Williamsburg and eventually Jamaica Queens. When I was a kid living in Bushwick, this was my train home, though at the time it had a different letter designation to it. It remains elevated the whole way. When we used to take class trips to museums in Manhattan, the bridge had a lot of boarding that blocked the view from the train. One of my friends said they were building a new tunnel because the river water was rising so high that the bridge would be underwater in a few years. Being 6 or 7 years of age, we bought it and were terrified. That memory cracks me up.
The now abandoned Domino Sugar plant. Soon to become abandoned Condominiums under the present economy. Another childhood memory, crossing this bridge and smelling the thick scent of sugar, much like when we used to smell baking bread from the Silvercup Bakery when crossing the Queensborough Bridge.

Two more views of the plant as we venture further into the Brooklyn end. I took these because there's such a beautiful and creepy gothic feel to this structure along side the early 60s addtion that I was fascinated and charmed and thrilled by it. I am glad that they will be keeping the signage, as they did with Silvercup and PepsiCola.

A final look at Manhattan, taken from my iPhone.

To be continued...

My Sunday Walk, Part 2

The incline on the walkway is quite merciful. Takes a while to get up there and with my hip issue it worked nicely for me. But I found the sense of being caged rather annoying. The view, which is really good, is marred by making me keenly aware of what its like to be a hamster. I wasn't thrilled.

See what I mean? For me, most of the walk was a mix of enjoying the beauty of the view and day and wanting to take bolt cutters and remove every inch of this wire fence so I could actually enjoy the expanse and beauty the bridge reveals. I will show you more on the Wednesday post where sometimes I managed to get the camera between wires, but it limited the angle I was able to get.

Here too, the overhead beams, which later disappear and make me suspect they are structurally unnecessary, entirely block what would be an amazing view of the western tower of the bridge. Williamsburg Bridge, for all its bad structural history, is a beautiful example of late 19th century industrial revolution architecture. But you can't really admire it on this walk going toward Brooklyn and that's a real shame. Also the red paint is odd and very out of place against the battleship gray of the bridge itself. Also it contrasts the view.
Poor KB. She's going to think I hate this walk. I don't, I'm just somewhat disappointed by aspects of it.
Here you can see the Western Tower at last. The walkway splits into northern and southern paths and you can look beyond to see it. Still fencing in the way, but really cool.

Again my feelings are split on this one. This is the construction plaque that names the bridge and the date it opened (December 19, 1903), as well as the Board of Bridges and the mayor of New York at the time (Seth Low).
The grafitti both delights and annoys me. I assume it was kept in this condition as a kind of marker of the neglect the bridge received for so many years, which I appreciate. It is a bit like the rectangle of still dirty ceiling at Grand Central Station to demonstrate how extensive the restoration work was. It reminds me of my youth in NYC when it was dirty and crime ridden and in some ways desolate. I know I know, I'm one of the sickos that misses skeevy Times Square too. More on that another time.

The frustrating part is that of course, you can't read the damned plaque and the colors are just as jarring as the red walkway.

To be continued.....

My Sunday Walk, Part 1

KB_in_NYC has been telling me to walk the Williamsburg Bridge for awhile now on Twitter and this Sunday I finally had time to do it.

I integrated the walk with a plan that I'd had to locate Mexican Coca Cola which had been rumored to be sweetened with cane sugar and the closest thing you could get to the original formula without actual cocaine in it. A friend at work had told me about a place in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn that had it.

So, cross the bridge, walk through part of Williamsburg and into Greenpoint, acquire said Coke and head home...a fun urban hike of a Sunday.

So, I put on my shorts and a light shirt, my Teva sandals and took my sumac root walking stick and got onto the F train to Delancey street in Manhattan.

Blogger was doing odd things to my post today and I had to run to work...so I begin briefly:


My home street in Brooklyn before getting on the subway. Seemed a perfect place to shoot the sky to give you a sense of what a beautiful day it was. Ahead is Fulton Street.


The Essex Street Market just off Delancey Street. This is about the only thing left of the old Delancey area. Delancey Street has become what I think of as an urban strip mall of cookie cutter shops. Gone are the picklers and clothiers and wonderful ethnic restaurants and bakeries. New York, the city of reinvention has lost its imagination.

Having said that, this building does display some imagination and engineering innovation, though it is atrocious looking and completely out of place in this neighborhood. I look at it and expect Harrison Ford to fly down in his cop car and knock me over while chasing Joanna Gleason.

The Williamsburg Bridge, looking toward Brooklyn from Delancey Street. The red walkway seems so odd and out of place, but inclines well and adds dimension to this historically troubled but to my mind beautiful bridge. Up until a few years ago, there was not a day in the existence of this bridge in which it wasn't under some kind of repair work. Seriously, from its opening there were so many things wrong with the construction of the bridge, it was in a constant state of reconstruction and repair.

A brief view looking north from the walkway while still over Manhattan. You can see the Chrysler building among others. The view is great though I found the "chicken wire", presumably meant to prevent "jumping" to be an annoying distraction from this amazing view.

To be continued.....