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D as in desolate
Wednesday, March 6 2002
At lunchtime, Gretchen and I rode the subway up to Jackson Heights in Queens and had the $7 buffet at the semi-world-famous Jackson Diner in the heart of Jackson Height's bustling Indian community.
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We rode there on the 7 IRT line, which, in Queens, runs on raised tracks above the ground. So there's a good view of the towers of Midtown Manhattan for a large part of the ride.
We missed our stop on the non-sub subway and so backtracked from the next stop down the line on foot. It's astounding how small and monolithic the neighborhoods in Queens can be. The place where we got out (at 82nd Street and Roosevelt) was thoroughly Hispanic; signs were in Spanish, as were all the books being sold by sidewalk vendors. The neighborhood remained Hispanic until we rounded the corner onto 74th Street, and then suddenly everybody was wearing saffron robes, turbans, and the like. Nothing was in Spanish anymore; many of the shop signs were now written Hindi. Clearly, the bulk of the Hispanics who bustle up and down Roosevelt almost never turn to walk down 74th Street, and few of the Indians on 74th Street ever think to venture out onto Roosevelt. The self-enforced insularity of these neighborhoods is almost comic in its extreme.
Surveying the Jackson Diner's buffet, we were a little surprised to find a noodle dish and a curry featuring baby ears of corn among the dishes, but I'm such a noodle fancier that I had to try them. Disappointingly, they had the greasy MSG-centric flavor of Chinese food, not the curried zing of Indian. We joked that perhaps these items had been added to attract a broader range of clients from other nearby ethnic neighborhoods. And, looking around, there were indeed quite a few east Asians in the dining room. Reassuringly, though, the bulk of customers in the Jackson Diner are always authentic Indians, many sporting ornamental dots and saris.
At some point during our meal, we got to discussing the heaviness of water. "It's the heaviest thing you have to carry when you go hiking," Gretchen pointed out. This gave me an idea. "Well," I said, "the heaviest part of water is oxygen, and since that's in the air, all you really need to carry is liquid hydrogen." Then, in a burst of geeky exuberance, I tried to imagine an idiot-proof portable system able to produce cold water by burning hydrogen.
This evening I went into Manhattan to meet up with Jami so I could hand-deliver a legal document releasing my rights to a certain photograph of Sally that I took recently in Prospect Park. I left kind of early so I could do a little more pedestrian exploring beforehand. This time I went walking deep into "Alphabet City," the part of the East Village so far east that the north-south avenues are named with letters instead of numbers.
I went even beyond Tompkins Square Park, all the way to Avenue D. For my money, the East Village is perhaps the most charming part of New York, with all the functional self-organized complexity of a city that has been allowed to evolve. Real estate is appropriated according to altitude, with shops on the street level and apartments above. But everything is on a human scale, with none of the highrise nonsense found elsewhere in Manhattan. No one has to walk very far for a smoke or a drink or a quick shot of urban excitement. There are plenty of trees, small gardens, and even a good supply of weird sculptures.
At Avenue D, however, all that is right with the East Village comes to an abrupt, tragic end. Farther east, whatever had once been of the East Village has been razed and replaced with high rise brick apartment buildings set on bleak, windswept commons. Unlike on the bustling streets to the west, here there are virtually no pedestrians in evidence whatsoever, aside from small groups of teens hanging out and glaring at passersby. This was a landscape built on an entirely non-East Village model, one where automobiles are prefigured as the transportation of choice and no one is expected to walk to get anything but into their car. I don't know if any of the people living in these high rises ever bothers with the East Village at all; their world seems like a completely different planet where alien physical laws apply. The high-rise "community" (such as it is) is so seemingly dependent on automobiles that there aren't nearby stores or convenient subway stops. It enshrines the flawed thinking of such urban planners as Robert Moses, who honestly thought the suburban trappings of the automobile age made sense even applied in a place as crowded as New York.
Up along 14th Street on Avenue D is a massive power plant, complete with smokestacks, anti-terrorism police patrols and the like. The plant is so big and inappropriate for this crowded real estate that it imparts a surreal quality into the air and even the ground around it in all directions. Cracks in the sidewalk on the south side of 13 St. were belching visible clouds of steam - steam whose heat I could feel as I walked past.
I met Jami at Mona's, a bar whose only visible presence on Avenue B is a tiny lighted Guiness sign. She'd just had dinner with her friend Kerri, who was still in her company for a limited time only. Whoah, that Kerri, she knows how to talk. The other things I learned about her within the only ten minutes she was there was that she is a virgin and a cartoonist. If I've learned one thing from the many messages of Britney Spears, it's that virgins (and their self-proclaimed pretenders) are cool.
Once Kerri was gone, Jami started acting concerned and maternal because she seemed to think I was acting, well, crazy. I was rocking back and forth on my uneven-legged barstool and I had "a crazy look" in my eye. "You need to get out more," she said. Earlier she'd said, "You need a haircut." I admitted that I haven't been reading Jami's site lately (don't start feeling superior; I don't read your site either - check your logs; my IP address is 24.168.67.86), and she was a little upset and suggested that I especially needed to check out her new series called Retail Photojournalism.
While we were at Mona's, we were witness to some of the typical excesses and non-excesses of its regulars. Two gutterpunkish girls were there, both featuring bright orange-red hair. One of them also had black zebra-pattern tribal tattoos covering more than half her face. "That's just too much," Jami said in horror.
Then there was a random white guy who struck up a conversation with Jami over a copy of the Brooklyn free tabloid The Phoenix she was skimming. (I'd brought it to learn about Brooklyn Mormons during the subway ride.) She found this new random guy reasonably cute but combative and even somewhat mean (in a typical New York sort of way). I didn't get this from him at all; to my mind he was being perfectly nice, albeit somewhat wry.
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