The mad cockerel of East Elmhurst

There was a brief lull during this terrible, terrible winter when the temperature rose above the mid thirties, well into the mid forties and promised to stay that way until sundown wherein it would rapidly plummet to somewhere in the teens bringing with it atrocious, bitter winds. It was in the face of such a forecast that I set off on my ill advised trip to complete Astoria.

The afternoon was pleasant as I detrained at Ditmars and I quickly picked up a bevy of maps of the junction between 31^st St and the Triborough Bridge. It is a well mapped place. Earlier that week I had trolled the Northern reaches of Astoria for naught but the exercise- all of Ditmars, Steinway, Rikers Island and a bit of East Elmhurst and nothing. Rikers Island is a big prison complex so I’m not really surprised they didn’t want to give me a map, but the rest of them? Bastards.

As I trudged along the still snow covered sidewalk of Astoria Blvd the temperature quite perceptively began to plunge. The filthy puddles of melted snow so recently created through the balmy afternoon began to skin over with ice. The wind took my breath away and I zipped my hood up like Kenny McCormack to keep out the cold. I could hardly hold my list of addresses for the cold but a noble voice from within urged me forward, would mere cold keep me from mapping Queens entire by the year’s end? Nonsense! Forward!

By a seemingly senseless quirk of my route planning process, of which I shall explain in due course, I rarely know en route where it is I am going or what it is I am looking for. So it was as I found myself still walking down Astoria long after the commercial and residential aspects of the road had abruptly ended and the four lane highway began. As the cars and trucks blasted past me I bleakly beheld what surely was my intended destination. There on the right lay a snowy, forsaken graveyard penned in between highways and no entrance in sight. Cursing the day I was born I skirted the fence until I found an entrance several hundred yards further along. Past rubble and building sites, past the grave stones of dead Germans and Italians, the wind still bitterly blowing and the temperature dropping further I walked towards the US flag atop a pole sensing graveyard attendants gather under the colors. I was right and I collected my prize- a map of St Michael’s cemetery- beautiful but unfortunately too big to use.

After pissing and uttering some gibberish to the kind ladies in the office I took my leave whereupon, almost immediately, I got lost among the winding paths and German and Italian gravestones. After several minutes of wandering I was about to turn back to the kind ladies when I met with the most extraordinary vision. Standing right there in front of me, blocking my way, even, was the most enormous white cockerel sporting a quite blood red head. I stopped dead in my tracks astonished beyond all telling and attempted to ascertain the amount of danger I may be in. The cockerel moved not one inch during this time except for a beady yellow eye so I decided somewhat reluctantly that I could pass the creature without incident. Possessed now with calm sobriety I saw that the creature was not enormous as I had feared put merely standing there in the tundra with its feathers puffed up for warmth but why it should pick such a bleak and windy spot was beyond my reckoning and as I was eager to leave such a place, beyond my patience. I took the vision of the cockerel with the blood red head as some kind of portent and decided to forego the rest of my damned list of addresses and make directly for home and with my hackles raised did just that.

Some time has passed since my meeting with the cock and my thoughts do turn to it from time to time. Could it be that a cockerel lives wild here in New York City, albeit not a very fashionable part of the city? Or was the creature a figment of my imagination, brought on by the intense cold? Was its presence for good or evil or was it a neutral force in a world existing for its own benefit only and amusing itself by lurking eerily to frighten passers by. I suspect a simple phone call to those very nice ladies who so kindly helped me with the map would clear up most of these questions but in God’s name where would the fun be in that?

Fucking finally! Astoria.

    “…And within a few minutes we were speeding through the wastes of Queens,” so wrote John Malcolm Brinnen in his 1955 biography Dylan In America as he describes picking up Dylan Thomas from Idlewild (later Laguardia) airport and driving him to Manhattan in 1953. To be sure, half a century later, there are great swathes of land- terrible, bleak housing estates- soulless and desolate that make up a large part of Queens but there are sure to be very many interesting and exciting parts there also, right? Exploring 109 square miles of Queens borough starts at the top left hand corner, in Astoria.

Astoria is New York City’s most diverse neighborhood, so they say in every real estate, food and shopping article ever written about Queens and it’s not for nothing that they do, as I was to find out. Many parts of Goodfellas were filmed around Astoria and, where I started, that’s what a lot of it looks like. Nice, civilized detached or semi-detached single or two story houses with a bit of a yard around them with nice civilized families living in them. Good hardworking middle class men called Paulie and Stewie who work as chief fire officer in your office tower or own the extractor fan concern off by the highway live there, and why not? Its quiet, fairly inexpensive, near some nice shops, the Greek restaurants, Astoria park, the East River right there with pretty Hell Gate Bridge crossing, near the train. Very civilized. All this in an area bound by the Con-Edison plant in the north, 31^st St in the east, Triborough Bridge to the south and the East River to the west. The nearer you get to the Triborough Bridge the grimier it gets but not so much that you wouldn’t still call it nice.

On the other side of the bridge is a hodge podge of styles, people, zoning and roads. There’s a whole mess of shit happening over there. There are the remnants of the original Astoria settlement- nice Victorian houses with a nice dazed looking family playing with a dog in the snow in the yard looking quaint and dainty next to the projects which make up the bulk of the housing there. The projects and the people who live in the projects. An appalling Florida Soviet style apartment building and whoever the hell lives there, some light industry thrown in for good measure, messy 21^st St with its Gyros and repair shops and there are a colony of pioneering hipsters who are furiously gentrifying the two or three blocks of blight they managed to find. I want to live there. I had the most fun at Build It Green, a furniture and lumber etc recycling venture at 317 26th Avenue.

 By the time I had explored this area (called Two Coves apparently) I was sick to death of walking around with cold wet feet and a hungry belly, I bloody mindedly stuck to my list but noticed not one thing around me and again I am sick to death writing about it.

I lived there for a while, it was fine. Everybody wants to talk about the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden and about how it is the only ‘destination bar’ in Astoria and it’s the only reason for Manhattanites to go to Queens. It’s just people drinking beer in a big, crowded paved yard. You’d be better off with a can of Sparks in a brown paper bag on some church steps than go all the way there for that.

I will say this, Astoria is diverse as hell but none of these people know each other. The kids running Build It Green are nowhere near the kids from the projects or the Goodfellas. The Con-Ed workers may have a meal in a Greek restaurant, maybe but then they’re off home to Nassau County and New Jersey. The Goodfellas know nothing but their own neighbors and how to get on the highway, the Indians and Bangladeshis on 21^st St don’t seem to live there, the people from the projects aren’t eating in the Greek restaurants but that’s the way diversity works, I suppose. People are different and staying different makes it interesting for people who live elsewhere to go there and write about how interesting and diverse the people who live there are when it’s just a load of people doing things just to live and pass the time in the best way they know how.

Next week I cross 31^st St and discover that part of the world. See you then.

Beautiful Chinese maps

I don't want to turn this into a blog of other people's maps but I have to show you this. I was going through my old bookmarks just now and a website that was full of porn the last time I checked (years ago) *ahem*is now dedicated to maps. Beautiful Chinese maps. Look at these. Gorgeous.

This is just from one page. There are hundreds of pages.

http://kcjun.5d6d.com/thread-2072-1-1.html

The Bronx.

I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about local history or do any research at all before I went to a neighborhood to troll for maps and that I was only going to comment on current conditions and first impressions but I realise now that this approach is silly and ignorant and does a disservice both to myself and the neighborhood I’m attempting to describe. A neighborhood today is the product of its history; its fabric, culture and demographic the result of decisions made by its residents and its elected officials as well as events in the wider world. I was taught this humbling lesson through my trolling of the fascinating and confounding borough of the Bronx and meeting the crazy, resilient and normal people who live there. I mean I could have spent the next few months pointing out the little quirks and oddities I found around me but without historical context, they mean nothing at all. The little yellow house I took a picture of? The chickens? The masses of community gardens? Nothing.

Why are there so many community gardens in a city where land values are so high? Why is there so little original, 19^th Century housing in the Bronx whereas Brooklyn still has vast swathes of the original housing stock? Why is the Bronx so poor here, mere miles from Wall St and Midtown?

To answer these questions I first trolled through the unreliable minefield that is Wikipedia and feasted upon the myths and legends there. I discovered that the Bronx was once a much different place than it is now.

Before the map thing, I’d only been to the Bronx twice. Once to buy a record player and another time to go to the zoo. I had heard something of its reputation as a rough place and no place at all to live or to visit after dark. I had heard the words ‘South Bronx’ uttered as a sneer, an oath, a warning but had no clear idea of what actually they meant. I then read some real books that were actually published, written by people who either lived in the Bronx or studied in a college of some repute and what I learned blew my mind. I’ve been terrorising friends and strangers alike with tales of the Bronx and now I set down in pixels this incredible story of birth, destruction and rebirth.

Now I grew up in North Liverpool during the 1980’s so I have some experience with declining populations, high unemployment, half abandoned housing estates stalked by drug addicts and bored youths looking for a fight and whilst it wasn’t exactly ‘white flight’ that happened to Liverpool, there was ‘middle class flight’ - they fled the inner city (and probably Liverpool entirely) as unruly elements and lethargy threatened to overwhelm the weakening social order, the increasingly ineffective and under funded police force and all presided over by a government that was seen by many of the residents who were left behind to have, if not actually precipitated and encouraged the decline in Liverpool’s fortunes, then had at least done nothing to try to halt it. North Liverpool hardly seemed like a viable community at all, or at least the part of it that I lived in didn’t. 25% unemployment, vandalism everywhere and only two people on our street owned a car. We played a game called man-hunt in the beautiful old abandoned grammar school across the road until a smack head burnt it down trying to cover his tracks. Our little gang would set fire to anything we could get away with; there was so much fuel about- they filled the inner walls on the Radcliff estate with straw, by Christ! We weren’t even the bad kids.I remember as a time of piss, puddles and fires.

What happened to Liverpool during the 70’s and 80 and 90’s mirrored what was happening in many Western urban centers but the decay and destruction in the Bronx was so rapid, systematic and total that it threatened to engulf the Bronx completely. The devastation was so total that some local politicians and industry leaders thought that it would be better to withdraw the remaining residents and, ‘blacktop the whole area and make it an industrial park.’ You have to watch the otherwise feeble film Wolfen to see some great footage of how it was. Visitors to the Bronx likened it to post war German towns and this in a place that was mainly farmland less than a century before. Like every good urban tale, it begins in the 1840s and it is, of course, a history of real estate and it is very difficult to tell this tale without telling you a history of Bronx real estate patterns. I’ll begin next time. For now I leave you with the progress I've made on the Bronx so far. This is the South Bronx and I've nearly finished it except for a bit over to the left and I've been over there 3 times and there just are no maps there. Poo.

Riverdale etc.

SPUYTEN DUYVIL

There are so many nice things in the world and I own so few of them- like this Porsche, for example. And a beautiful two storey house nestled on the leafy banks of the Hudson River, steps away from the Spuyten Duyvil Metro-North, a short ride, maybe in a nice Porsche from a ‘shopping-street-with-a-small-town-feel’ where one can enjoy tolerable pizza and beer with one’s local friends and buy pastries and mail a letter. One’s fine, fine children will be privately educated in one of the Great Private Schools scattered about hillsides and one’s wife will play bridge and attend functions. Or whatever good Upper Middle Class Jewish Families do when they live in gorgeous neighborhoods. I would like to have seen it decades ago before they built the huge blocks of flats. Is a nice neighborhood still nice even after you’ve built the behemoth in front of the sun and the river and covered half the hills with parking. In all fairness, the bit I really liked covered only about a block of prettiness down the hill towards the station, up the hill is 30 blocks of pettiness. Nowhere outside of the heavy artillery firing range at Fort Carson, Colorado have I seen so many signs warning trespassers to stay out, no soliciting, no photographs, parking for residents only and if it happens that you are lucky enough to be invited to visit a guest in their apartment, detailed instructions on how to approach the residence, and that’s only in Spuyten Duyvil, the less tony of the upper Bronx neighbourhoods, fuck Fieldston.

FIELDSTON

Fuck Fieldston

RIVERDALES

If you felt like trespassing all over Fieldston, braving their private police security, soliciting, taking pictures and parking your car where you’re not supposed to, you will see that the nice house in a leafy glade without the sun blocking behemoth can exist in New York City because that’s what happens when you live in a private community, pay dues to the Fieldston Property Owners' Association who take over responsibilities of the city and no doubt have a covenant prohibiting you to do anything within Fieldston other than drive your nice black Porsche in and out of your driveway to go to work.

This is not the case with The Riverdales, known as South Riverdale, Riverdale and North Riverdale where the cottages and other single family homes are interspersed with big apartment buildings blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, what am I, a fucking realtor? I’m not going back up there because there’s nothing to do, of course there’s a park but there’s a park down the road from ours. Damn it, I have to go back because I didn’t find enough maps. I can’t talk about this place because I was only there for a couple of hours. I liked the Irish workmen walking their tiny dogs; I always wondered where those fellas lived. I liked the homeless shelter on the seedy end of the neighborhood and the loonies standing outside it. It always gets seedy near the border. I liked the border and I stepped over it to experience the wonders of Yonkers briefly. I liked the Bx 7 bus that took me swiftly from Riverdale to Manhattan and although it wasn’t quite as nice as the black Porsche of my other life, at least I could finish my book.

Hunts Point

Hunts Point is another poor ass neighborhood in South Bronx, this one notable for the fearful level of poverty, the lively commercial activity in the huge industrial park there and the massive, massive food markets there. I have been to other parts of New York that have maybe been as poor but the people are a jolly people, more like an ‘Oliver Twist- The Musical’ kind of poverty not the sullen, makeshift poverty of Hunts Point which manifests itself in a dearth of joy or activity- only orange food and the numbers.

I did find a Mister Softee ice cream truck distribution center and a dozen ice cream trucks waiting to be filled up with delicious goodness. It seems you can pick your own route and many of the guys do nothing more than circle the streets surrounding this Mister Softee ice cream truck distribution center plying their wares. Ha, that’s what I would do! There are so many of them, its almost a procession.

Further in, there is an old building called the Banknote Building, an old banknote building renovated for small businesses but as yet virtually empty. In spite of its emptiness, or maybe because of it, you can wander freely throughout the whole building. It’s a great place for a game of hide and seek and I got some beautiful shots of the Bruckner Expressway and beyond.

For the markets is the only reason anybody would need to go to Hunts Point, and that’s why I went there. "The World's Largest Food Distribution Center" according to the website and I tried and tried and tried to find someone with a map of the bugger. I walked and walked and talked to everybody and I came close once when a long series of ‘ask this fella’ culminated in the office of the manager of the mechanics and maintenance department, or such and the fella rifled through his filing cabinet for several minutes before admitting defeat. Damn. Thank Christ for the NYC Planning Office. If it weren’t for them boys my map of the Bronx would look like shite.

There is fantastic pizza at Fratelli’s, right there in Hunt’s Point and Joe, the owner said he would help me with a map but they never do, they never do.

Not everyone was as helpful as manager and Joe, the security guard to the fish market nearly had an aneurysm when I skirted around his checkpoint to take a picture of the prison barge near there and blew a gasket completely when I asked if he happened to have a map of the locality. He shielded his face from me and told me that he wouldn’t answer any questions at all. I must have looked a bit Talibanny that day.

I ended my tour with a visit to the new park which finally gives Southern Bronxiterish access to the water that surrounds them. Even in Autumn there was plenty going on with the fishing, taking pictures of a dancer, boozing and dog walking. When the swimming pool barge is in full swing, I bet the place is a blast. I enjoyed Hunts Point immensely and would totally gentrify the shit out that place.

The Arse-end of The Bronx- Mott Haven

I get the feeling that Mott Haven used to be a nice place to live. Walking to Bruckner Blvd from the 138th St station you pass several nice buildings, standing like good teeth in a rotten mouth and even a whole block or so given landmark status. What happened, Bronx? What made you so filthy and bedraggled? While searching for the answer I discovered several websites very similar to my own that cover this history and where you may also find about the nicer buildings and who the streets are named after and other remarkable things, the best of which is probably this;- http://www.forgotten-ny.com/. So in the interest of keeping the internet as free from useless repetition as possible and lessening my research burden I will relay only first impressions; ignorant, shallow and uneducated as they may be.

I don't know The Bronx at all so I don't know where to walk to find maps. I've ended up walking pointlessly up the whole length of a road with nothing on it but mapless projects so to eliminate these dreary journeys I found I had to do a bit of research after all. Poor neighbourhoods generally map themselves with Chinese restaurant menu maps so, using Google, I plot a circuitous course around a given neighbourhood visiting every Chinese restaurant and seeing what there is to see in between, so...

Mott Haven is a poor, poor neighbourhood in the southern-most part of The Bronx. The area seems to be mainly Puerto Rican and a little bit black. Just over the 3rd Avenue Bridge is a few blocks of big factories developers and artists are and have been turning into lofts, the vanguard of gentrification. I picked up leaflets about the big plans afoot to redevelop South Bronx but I cut up the only English language one. 'El South Bronx esta volviendo a tener barrios activos y seguros y una economia creciente,' which is good news.

I met only one other white guy (outside the Bruckner/3rd Ave Green Zone) and he seemed disappointed to see me. He was collecting his dry cleaning which seemed important to note at the time although I don't know why now. In amongst the obvious idleness, poverty and neglect there are wee flowers of real community activism, inventive and imaginative ways to improve the neighbourhood and pass the time. Because of the reduced pressure for space, lower expectations for the people who live here and the fact that things have improved dramatically (the crime rate has gone down 80% in 15 years), the people here have far more licence to do things that would be unacceptable in other parts of the city; booze on the street, massive community gardens, build a rickety old ranch house on an empty lot and keep chickens. It's great while it lasts.

Mott Haven is still a sad little place to live- a cop on every third corner, unbeautiful housing, no bars, bad food and no access to the waterfront but all that will slowly change. I hope the chickens can stay