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.