Behind in my work

I've renewed a promise to myself to write a new entry at least once a week. So here goes.

It was great seeing all of you in Seattle, where the weather was wonderful and the company even better. Thanks, Susan and Tom and Mary, for making room for me in the middle of your busy weekend. And thanks to the rest of you for doing your usual best to put together an impromptu party with fabulous snacks.

Here in NYC, we're having Seattle weather - rain, rain, rain. Lucky for them, Sophie and Melissa are in Puerto Rico and missing the precip. Specifically, they're on the Isla de Vieques, where the horses run wild and the water in a certain bay is luminescent.

On Saturday, I went on a garden tour of the Lower East Side. The area we were in is also called Loisaida (pictures here), a word that even appears on street signs as an alternative name for Avenue C. It comes from casual use but also from a 1974 poem by the Nuyorican poet Bittman Rivas. Over the decades, the Lower East Side has changed from Jewish working class to Latino and Puerto Rican to hipster - and it's still changing.

I went there with a walking group called the Outdoors Club - I've done several walks with them, and this was by far the most interesting, culturally speaking. The gardens we visited were mostly community gardens and of wide variety - some purely floral, some with hardscape built by hand, many with found-object decoration. One was filled with stuffed animals and toy robots. These things hung from trees and walls and popped up out of the ground like little buried treasures.

The best was more like a wild prarie field, filled with grass and sculpture. The Kenkelaba Sculpture Garden was a on a lot between two buildings that the community fought fiercely to keep from development when an old building was torn down by the city -- the same was true of many of the other gardens spaces.

The Kenkelaba garden was next to an an apartment building that's run as an artists' coop. Across the street was a gallery owned and run by the guy who owns the apartment building. He came out to talk with us and show us around his gallery, where he has pieces by most of the major African American artists of the last half century -- Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, even Muhammed Ali. A tiny little place filled with treasures, plus a back garden full of chairs made of tools, computers, jerrycans, just about anything you can imagine.

The day ended with a visit to the central courtyard of Stuyvesant Town, a planned community built by Met Life after World War II - very much like the place where Susanne grew up, Parkchester in the Bronx, where affordable housing was made available to veterans, teachers, and other middle-class workers. Stuyvesant Town was recently sold to a corporation and now apartments are being rented at market rates, much to the dismay of the people who live there. Their rents won't go up - it's rent-controlled - but a woman on the tour who lives there said that the new owners have set up a class system, where new tenants can use certain facilities that are no longer open to old-time residents. There's now a private library and a private bar/cafe. Seems like there's a lot of resentment building.

Despite that, the central garden of Stuyvesant Town is lovely -- mature trees, a huge fountain, lots of lawn and park benches. An idyll in the middle of the city.

But in New York, nothing is an idyll for long . . .