College Point, Queens

North of Downtown Flushing then, isolated from civilized society by a big motorway, an industrial estate and the sea is College Point. College Point has the feel of a Northern Irish town, to me. I’m not sure any more what I meant by that when I wrote it down. Maybe walking through the sad industrial park in the rain was reminiscent of a time I walked through a similar Northern Irish industrial park. Maybe because it is a busy and introspective little residential town built around and divided by the only main road, in the rain. Maybe it was the truck drivers cheerfully abusing other truck drivers’ double parked trucks, in a fashion I did see in Northern Ireland, as they inched along the narrow road. I don’t remember. It might have been the rain, which was an on again off again moderate drizzle as I remember- very Northern Irish.

A Fancy House

Before I went to visit College Point, I read in the Wikipedia that it was a working class neighborhood. I disagree with this assessment. While small areas of shabby housing suggested that some of it is working class I encountered a good many more substantial and well kept houses suggestive of the middle class. Also, it was here that I got my first taste of the detached house sitting on a bit of a garden that would be the staple diet during my journey through much of the rest of Queens. After months of treeless tenements and brownstones or apartment buildings with a token piece of shrubbery set off to the side, I was so taken with the novelty of such a thing as a garden that I took a hundred pictures of them. The houses are not working class, they are fancy class. The more north you go, the fancier it gets.

All the maps I found of College Point were all in a three block stretch of College Point Boulevard which amounts as almost the same thing as only finding one map. ‘Tis the way of all things- feast or famine. I want to tell you about all the great times and all the interesting people I met along the main road there but really only http://empire-market.com/  stands out because I bought some delicious sausage there.

Flushing Bay

There is some great waste ground in College Point. There’s a great view of La Guardia Airport from a piece of waste ground at the end of 15^th Ave. There’s a massive piece of waste ground along 20^th Ave which used to be an airport. After all the day’s gallivanting I didn’t go in but people do. There’s a nice set of photos here http://www.flickr.com/photos/vogelium/sets/72157594179892280/. It’s a good place to go birding http://10000birds.com/birding-flushing-airport.htm so I hear.

The only reason non locals would ever go to College Point is for the mighty Spa Castle http://nyspacastle.com  , known far and wide for sublime relaxations and restorative activities. They didn’t have a map but they did have a plan which is quite the same thing sometimes.

Powell's Cove

There’s a marina up there too and I walked past nice little seasidey homes to get to it. At the marina they did not have a map of the marina but pinned to the bar door they did have a nice map of the Bronx River I’d been looking for. I took it and ran away imagining that I was about to be chased and ran to ground by yacht owning gardeners, missing their map and fearing for the rest of their property. I hid in a park until I imagined they had gone away, ruining my nice umbrella on a branch in the process. In the park, there’s a bit of a beach with a nice view of the Whitestone Bridge but a lot of dead Horseshoe crabs. A good place to wee.

Malba

On the way home I walked past a hideous place called Malba which is distinctive only for the vulgar ostentation of the huge, glittering McMansions that have been built there apparently by people lacking in taste or discretion and completely untethered by any zoning laws or neighborhood covenants.

On the bus back to the 7 train I took a picture of the back of this man's head.

The Back of a Man's Head

Maspeth

If you would permit me to use an analogy for a moment, I would compare New York City to your house, your home. Midtown is the kitchen where the real business of the day is conducted, there’s your ma sitting at the kitchen table paying the bills. Wall St is your Dad sitting on the couch yelling at the TV with a betting slip in his hand. The Upper East Side a far off room where your very elderly Granny sits dozing in the window. The Lower East Side a teenager’s bedroom filled with rock posters and semen stains. Park Slope where your older sister sits and pouts all day long wishing she wasn’t surrounded by such worthless peasants and along a little path from the kitchen, at the bottom of the garden is a little potting shed where your dad’s older brother Tony sits fiddling with an old valve radio in his comfortable cardigan and talks about the Korean War. This is Maspeth, Queens.

It is the 1950’s in Maspeth, Queens. The streets are clean and tidy, the modest houses, families, shops and restaurants are clean and tidy, the bank manager knows your name, the flag is flying, no one is going to steal your bike and if it was they’d know who took it, Italian food is food and Chinese food is ethnic food. It is a fine, fine place.

I’ve been slandering Maspeth for years now, like every other self-respecting Brooklyner, without ever having visited the place. Actually I was there for a while; you see, several summers ago I ran around with a crazy ex-ballerina in her very early 20’s. Contrary to the popular saying I aged about 5 years during the 6 week fling. It was the summer of the blonde ballerina and also the summer of gin. My roommates and I would go through 3 bottles of Gordon’s a week. The ballerina introduced me to snorting pharmaceuticals which disagreed with me and we’d sit in her spartan kitchen melting in the heat, swatting away the flies, completely at loss for anything to say to one another. We’d walk to the first bar in Williamsburg and she would try to make friends with the junk yard dogs she met along the way. In an attempt, I suppose, to make myself seem as young, vital and crazy as she I hurled the tops of fire hydrants down the road and we’d watch the sparks fly before they’d smash to a stop against a store front or a car wheel. We watched Gummo together and it reminded me of the crazy stories she told me about the fucked up things she used to do with her friends upstate, the friends that wanted to come downstate to kick my ass for going out with their friend who was much too young for me.

I sat and thought that when I was her age I had just moved to Belfast and was chugging 3 litre bottles of Wild and White with Gordy and Ciaran Kennedy, I had not yet met the civilizing influences of Deirdre or Clive and since that time had completed Art College, bummed around Belfast for a few years, moved to Colorado for six years, got married, moved to New York, got separated and I had done all this spartan kitchen thing before and couldn’t really face all those hangovers again. Well I knew all that but it was exciting anyway and much of it was a lot of fun. And as I sat there so tired, so, so tired in the miserable heat in the shabby outskirts of Maspeth with nothing around to eat but bad pizza and Chinese food I could hardly disagree with the general consensus that Maspeth was a shit hole. If I’d just walked around a little bit more I would have seen the cute, varied little neighborhood, untouched by modern development (except sadly riven in twain by the Long Island Expressway) and the lucky people who live there, the cemeteries, the disused railroad lines and old factories. Except for that one corner of Flushing and Metropolitan which will always be Gummo.

 

How it all began

Very often people will come up to me in the street and say, ’Martin, how is it you started your map project anyway?’

‘Well,’ I reply, ‘let me bring you back to that chilly day in November when it all started.’ I straighten out an old half finished cigarette which I produced from my shirt pocket and light it, pulling deeply on the smoke and I begin. ‘You see,’ I say, ‘I was walking through Bed-Stuy with my girlfriend and our mutual friend Chela Edmunds when I saw an old restaurant menu lying on the ground. Now, rubbish on the ground is no rare thing in Bedford-Stuyvesant but this piece of rubbish had a little map which intrigued me at the time. The map helped illustrate to the viewer the exact location of the restaurant by showing a few blocks, the names of a couple of streets and an arrow, as I’m sure you’re familiar with. Following a habit I had observed in my father, I put the menu in my pocket.

The story, such as it is, may have ended right there at the pocketing of the menu had I not found a second menu a little further along the road. This menu was from a different restaurant than the first and although the menu had a map, it showed a slightly different area of town than the first, illustrating its different location. I found to my delight that when I put the two maps together they made a larger, yet contiguous area. I surmised, foolhardily that if one were to walk the whole length and breadth of the vast metropolis one may very well gather enough such maps to build a complete map of New York City.’

So The Great Map Project was born and I have talked about little else since, to the detriment of friends and strangers alike.

Early on I set some basic rules for the project. The first rule is that the map has to be an actual physical object; I can’t just pull Jpegs off the internet. This rule has eroded somewhat since many documents exist only as PDFs, especially in the current economic climate, paper being the price it is, environmental considerations and such (ahem). So I pull the odd PDF, but no Jpegs.

The second rule became important as I began to use Photoshop- no resizing, no cutting no nothing. You have to use the map as you found it and use the whole map, no cutting out the bits you need or stretching it so it will fit. Some people think I’m crazy for having this rule, it’s certainly made things more difficult but the authenticity is important.

I decided to begin at the beginning- Downtown Manhattan and I gathered a great swathe of maps in one swoop, in a month I had gathered maps from Bowling Green to NYU, although Tribeca took an eternity to finish and the Lower East Side is still shitty even now. So anyway I glued all these maps down to a 1 foot by 3 foot board imagining that this would be a sufficient size for at least Manhattan. The board was much too small and by gluing the maps down before they were all gathered I was unable to place maps underneath.

I started again and this time I loosely built the map on my bedroom floor. Breezes, pubes, dust and cat prints forced me to adopt my third and most successful method of organization. I bought a scanner, scanned all the images into my computer and played with them in Photoshop. The actual maps are now in folders in a drawer in my studio. I found that this is the best place for them when, a year into my project, in the very early hours of a frosty January morning my flatmate’s room caught on fire and threatened to spread to mine also. The only way out for me was a 30 foot drop into the alley below. After dressing, calling the Fire Department and my girlfriend I threw my computer down into a trashcan below. I put the physical maps into a suitcase with some books I had yet to read and threw that down too. Those were the only things I wanted to save. With my head out the window because my room was filled with smoke I thought about, what? I don’t remember. I remember feeling lonely.

The Fire Department came within minutes and put the fire out before it spread to my room. It looked for a while that the only thing I lost in the fire was the computer but the thing started right up when I finally summoned the courage to plug it in. Thanks Julian Dumont of Practical I.T. Solutions of Colorado Springs, CO for building such a marvelous, impact resistant computer.

So the map existed only digitally for a long time before I finally printed it out. Here it is on 72 pieces of  8.5 x 11 glued together with Pritt stick and hung with masking tape. It was on the wall for a long time when, while we were away in Spain, the cats tore it down chasing a house centipede. Lisa, the house sitter rolled it up as best as she could and left it on a bench in the studio. The cats tore it up and used it as a bed and then pissed on it. I threw it away.

 

So the project continues and I explain more later.

Tokion

There’s a newspaper I get every Thursday, it's called Tokion, I believe. It is written in Japanese. Of the contents of this newspaper I know nothing but one article and I’m there every Thursday at Sunrise Mart ripping out the article putting the rest of the paper back. I used to throw the paper away but it seemed like a waste. Anyway, this article is very interesting to me because in it the author chooses a NYC subway line to follow, visits each station and describes some things that may be found around and about, including a nice little map. The map of course interests me and it has provided some cheerfulness in drab corners I never thought I would ever find a map for. Also, it provides a bit of continuity, stitching great areas together with uniform cute blue maps.




I discovered it right at the beginning of the map project, a map the Mott St station of the Far Rockaway A line, which is right at the beginning of that route. Had I put two and two together at the time I would have many beautiful maps of areas I despair of ever finding a map for. By the time I rediscovered it, the A train had been over and done and the author was in the middle of doing the J train. I have been collecting them ever since. I even went to their office on Lafayette where a nice lady called Keiko gave me a load, but not enough old papers to chop up.



Last Christmas the J train reached the last stop at Broad St and my life was filled with great excitement as I waited to see what the next train line would be. I was kept waiting for three whole weeks! They waited for the holidays to end, they were snowed in during the crazy snowstorm and then, then they brought out an issue. It was the D train, very good- I don’t have any of that area at all. Sigh, anyway the next post will be better, I promise. I include an early version of Bed-Stuy for illustrative purposes, Bed Stuy looks much better now.

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.

The Greatest Chinese Menu Map Ever!

The west side of Columbia between 96 and 60

No maps anywhere along the whole avenue. Because Manhattan is built on a tidy little grid, people don't need maps to find a place. Only the Lincoln Center.