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

Manhattan Finished

I've done about as much of this place as I can right now and I'm going to concentrate on the outer boroughs. Later on I'll have a wee skip about the place and see if I can pick up a map or two to fill in the gaps and write a bit about the different neighbourhoods thereabout. Here is finished Manhattan sans Liberty Island, where the Statue of Liberty is, which isn't part of Manhattan anyway.

The Greatest Chinese Menu Map Ever!

Roxbury, Queens.

Dear Michael,
I'm very drunk. I walked down a very long road in Brooklyn called Flatbush Avenue. I started on Cortelyou Rd and ended up in The Rockaways. I saw a great many things- Haitian ghetto, the Target store, Jewish suburbia, pastel polo shirts segueing into 9-11 T-shirts, a golf course, grassy wetlands to the beach, a long bridge over to Rockaway and turned right to a private community called Roxbury. I saw a party from the bridge and thirsty from my travels I went there. The hospitality, grudging and suspicious at first improved after laying low for a while amongst the middle aged, middle class republican firefighters, I told one man (Henry) about my 8 mile odyssey to their party. Not that I've anything against these people, I just get nervous surrounded by 200 of them. I believe only my accent saved me from being kicked off their private beach.

Nevertheless I made many new friends at this party who I will never see again. When I told a trio of drunk older residents I was looking for maps they only half jokingly made me promise that I wasn't a terrorist bent on destroying their community. Ha ha. I promised. Many of them are the descendants of the people who originally founded the town a hundred years ago. You can't just move in to this place, you have to be invited. Nice.

The occasion was the 100 year anniversary of the Roxbury Volunteer Fire Department and a band played music, free Budweiser. I think it is beautiful that there is room in New York City for a community of right wing, middle aged reactionaries. It was like being in Colorado Springs again- all those 9-11 T-shirts covering beer bellies, orange skin and baggy arms. Just beautiful.

St Nicholas Ave/ Washington Heights

St Nicholas Ave is a truly grand and majestic strip of real estate which my fairly grand neighborhood of Ditmas Park look like the ewok village. Past, present and future home of well to do Black people, nice parks, great real estate all the way to the meeting of Broadway at 160th St where the architecture humbles to basic tenements, the population is mainly Spanish speaking (Dominican) and the zoning changes from quite strictly residential to a lively jumble of shitty restaurants, discount stores and cell phone stores. I got a great map from an old people's home though.About the shitty restaurants- I tried to order a gyro at a pizza place, probably my first mistake and after waiting over ten minutes for it I left in a huff. I don't want to eat the gyro it takes ten minutes to make. After several more aborted attempts to have teenagers feed me fast food I stumbled delirious into a time warp. A hokey old fashioned Cuban eatery presided over by a hale old woman as her very elderly husband? dozed in front of the TV, intermittently woken by the sound of his own name attached to the junctions of her monologue.
It was still a bone dry piece of Cuban sandwich I received but at $4 including seat, who's complaining?
A lively place in the daytime, I have it on good authority that it rocks at night. Indeed it has a reputation for being the most violent and crime ridden part of Manhattan but reports may be exaggerated. It's a long old fucker of a road starting at 110th St and ending at 193rd St. I never did get to the end of it.
...and unlike in much of the rest of Manhattan where you have the smell of someone else's lunch blown through a vent at you while walking down the street, Washington Heights's wide and airy streets blow no fumes from the trough at you. I found it to be one of the more livable parts of Manhattan.

Except I did stumble into another dimension trying to find my way home- a wee mixed white/ mixed enclave carved out of Washington Heights at 181st St which calls itself Hudson Heights. It even had a wine store that sold only wine- no liquor! Also a sushi place that wasn't part of a Chinese restaurant- a true gauge of fanciness. People looked at me funny here as I trolled for maps where they mostly ignored me in Washington Heights proper. I saw a great map in a locked building, I wanted to break the window but that would have been silly, wouldn't it?

Harlem done at last.

Dear mum,
Lenox Avenue is the first of the Avenues that begin and end in Harlem. It has been renamed Malcolm X but the locals continue to call it by its old name. It runs from 11oth St to 147th St and unlike the avenues to the east which contain a large majority of Latinos, Lenox Ave is predominantly Black with a large and active contingent Muslim and African. The architecture is mainly tenement style buildings interspersed with a good many new and ugly apartments. Maybe Victorians thought Victorian buildings were ugly. It's hard to judge a street on a hot holiday weekend but Lenox Ave was still lively, almost bustling and fun.
Businesses, such as they are can be divided into 3 categories- stores selling baseball caps and African dresses, bodegas and supermarkets and beauty parlours/ barbershops with the latter category far outnumbering the former two combined. If all the beauty parlours/ barbershops were disappeared I think the resulting real estate vacuum would summon the feared double dip recession. The presence of so many beauty parlours appears to be quite beneficial to the community as the women there are consistently beautiful and well maintained.

Ogling aside, there's not much there except the fine Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I was going to write about how the main exhibition there seemed to gloss over the last 400 years of Black American history before I learned that the exhibition was a retrospective highlighting 25 years of exhibitions. So that's why. The smaller exhibition in the basement was better. It dealt with inequalities in the NYC school system. Almost 100% of white 9th graders graduate within 4 years whilst less than 50% of black and hispanic students graduate within 4 years. I was going to write about how as a sunburnt Irishman looking for maps I notice that it's the blacks and latinos who check my ID to get into the place and the whites who work upstairs and tha
t for whatever reason, the system is failing, creating or maintaining a caste of gatekeepers and tradesmen but at the last minute, due to my ignorance I decided not to.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd, known affectionately to the locals as 7th Ave is- I swear to God the mosquito I'm trying to kill has a fucking teleporter- is more of the same as Lenox I was admittedly tired and hot by that stage and should really go back. There are more bars on ACP Jr Blvd than there are on Lenox. I should have availed myself of one but I couldn't find a Chase ATM. The bugger got me. The phone ate my photos again so I've nothing to show you. Here is a nice picture of a dog instead.