Gotham City Soul

It is a clear Sunday morning in the summer of 1828 and skiffs filled with people both black and white make their way across the East River from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan Island. The white people are churchgoers, on their way to services. The black men rowing them will also worship. The African-Americans guide the skiffs into slips and the white families disembark, making their way to Henry Street, where lies St. Augustine's, a brand-new Episcopal church. They take their places in the pews that fill the nave. Meanwhile the blacks climb up two treacherously narrow staircases to a pair of small rooms behind the pipe organ at the back of the church. It is dark and stiflingly hot where the Africans stand packed together. These rooms made up the church's slave gallery, one of two that remain in the United States today. (The other is in Boston's South Church.) For decades the church's staff and its parishioners knew what the spaces had been, but not until 1999 did they decid...

I've backtracked five years to give a short chronicle of black people and their migration up the island of Manhattan. This is swiped from Ame rican Legacy , for which I wrote this article in 2003 called "At Rest". And so they were buried. After two centuries of lying forgotten in the ground, and another dozen years being studied, squabbled over, and finally, honored, 419 wooden caskets, decorated with traditional West African symbols and village scenes were lowered into crypts in a small plot of land next to 290 Broadway, all that remains, in any practical sense, of an African burial ground, the oldest known cemetery of its kind in the United States. As I walked along Reade Street toward Broadway on my way to the reinterment ceremony in October 2003, I in all likelihood walked near more graves, all located under downtown buildings. The original burial ground spread across five to six acres of lower Manhattan that is today bounded by Duane Street and City Hall Park o...

So a very close friend of mine, who also grew up in Jersey, and whom I met during götterdämmerung of Hoboken in it's gentrification days of the 1980s and early 1990s (it was a bloodbath) was visiting from Los Angeles, where he moved five years ago. He got caught off-guard by the changing landscape here on Manhattan Island and wrote a truly gloomy poem about it. He was closely followed by another dear friend, who has lived in Chelsea for the past 15 years, who sent me an article in The New York Times about the death of Bohemia, which I will not even bother to link to, because I'm tired of all of the weeping and moaning and gnashing of teeth. Not because it isn't warranted, but because I think we should be capable of something else. Anything else. Even fiddling while Rome burns is a more attractive alternative than bemoaning our fates and the fate of our beloved city and doing nothing. That said, I think what galls me most is that people only really get involved when it...

I've talked about this here at Gotham City Soul myself and I must say I'm even tired of hearing myself complain about it, this thing I will call the luxury malling of Manhattan. It's been ugly, gentrification, the pushing out of minorities, the working poor, and others to make way for mostly rich or well-off white people. Churches closed, mom and pop shops run out by high rents, building destabilized and converted to condos, other buildings knocked down so that greedy developers with no vision and no clear love for New York City besides its real estate value can erect flimsy glass and metal boxes with no aesthetic value whatsoever. But something I read the other day has stopped me in my tracks, and I've decided I've done enough fussing for now. There's just too much bad news in the world to keep adding to it. The article to which I'm referring was in the local newspaper The Villager. It is about Florent Morellet , who, for 23 years owned the magical Fl...

The East River part has been slowly, slowly, getting a facelift, to the tune of millions of dollars, all well-deserved. Of all the parks in the city, it is my favorite, not just because of its proximity to my house (Thompkins Square Park, another favorite, is closer), but because it's so . . . normal. There are no testerone-fueled packs of extreme cyclists ready to mow everyone down like in Central Park. The landscape doesn't feel inaccessible, like Bryant Park (when it wasn't being overrun by fashion week or some such). Sure it has been worn down in places, but that's been worked on to wonderful effect. The promenade is being rebuilt and we have access to the river again. Here's something I wrote about the park some years back. It is a good park, the East River Park, measured not in acres, but in the sounds that it produces. First there are the obvious sounds. The big noise of Latin men playing the games of their childhood; Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans,...

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