By Caitlin Hawke

Easily my favorite facade in our neighborhood, the Alimar stands at the northwest corner of W. 105th Street and West End Avenues. It's another story of buildings in these parts that have names and I will have to dig on this one. But for now, behold the Haussmannian beauty of this grande dame. Her copper bays and sumptuous detail. I have often wondered if she's prettier from the outside than from the interior. Maybe if you are a neighbor there, you will comment about the Alimar below.

By Caitlin Hawke

A little slice of life on Broadway and a nod to the Mom & Pops of yore!

By Caitlin Hawke

Ma La. If you've ever tasted a sichuan peppercorn you know of what I speak. And Ma La is what you'll get, in literal varying degrees, at 108 Food Dried Hot Pot. How to describe this very specific taste? Ma La is to Sichuan cuisine what umami is to Japanese cooking. Indispensable. At its mildest, Ma La is the sensation of a peppery spice that tingles on your tongue. At its strongest, it's a three-alarm fire.

But let me assure you that I don't have a high tolerance for spicy, and 108 Food Dried Hot Pot has just the right level for me.

In what was Cannon's Pub on the southeast corner of Broadway and W. 108th Street in a cheery, cherry red storefront sits 108 Food Dried Hot Pot. It's a humble spot that looks more like a cafeteria or a food court than a mecca for thrill seekers. When Columbia is in session, watch out because the turnover and traffic is prodigious. I even know a colleague who travels 3.5 miles down to this spot when the urge hits.  He's Taiwanese and claims it's the closest he's come to the food he grew up on. I wouldn't be surprised if Tony Bourdain ate there. It's just his kind of place.

I've warmed progressively to this temple of spice. And here now is an ode to the thing on the menu that people come from all points to devour: the dry hot pot.

First keep in mind that you'll have to choose your spice level. The four-point scale goes from non-spicy, to spicy, then medium spicy and finally to very spicy. You'll actually have to choose everything. But be thinking about how brave you plan to be. You might want to be incremental and start on the low end of the Sichuan Richter scale.

That will be the last thing you tell the cashier. And she'll repeat the scale at least twice before you make a stab at the level you want. So think on it. Now.

Before you get to that, you are going to be under a little pressure to choose your stir-fry ingredients. Here, too, I advise prudence. It's priced per pound. Meat, fish and shellfish are weighed separately from the veggies and tofu you'll choose. And you want the person who is choosing your ingredients to not have too heavy a hand if you want variety of ingredients. Again, it's priced per pound.

So you could go surf and turf with sole and chicken, shrimp and pork, or focus on the more exotic meat choices like beef tripe and chicken gizzards. But in between, there are many other delicacies to choose from like squid, shrimp balls, and paper thin slices of fatty beef.

Once you've conquered the meats, turn to the body of your dish. Stoke it with bok choy, cabbage, string beans, enokis, three or four sorts of tofu, eggplant, bean threads, lotus, cellophane noodles and much more.

Then it's on to the weighing and paying. It's by the pound so make sure what you see is what you can eat! A very filling bowl will run you roughly $12-14. After you pay, your selections are whisked back into the kitchen and in 7 minutes later: Behold the Bowl!

Glistening with the spicy oil -- at the heat level you pre-selected -- your hot pot arrives with a side of rice. One bite of the fillet of sole -- slightly crunchy perhaps because it was dusted in flour on its way to a sizzling hot skillet -- and you know there's a master chef in the back. Then a bit of chicken: moist and delicious, again. And the supporting cast of vegetables? All have their crunchy snap. Each element is cooked to perfection and all together make up a meal, bespoke for you and you alone.

You can share a hot pot or create your individual dish.

People are trekking here because the hot pot spot has drawn raves. And you've been walking by it each week wondering what's going on in there.  Wander and wonder no more. Go in. Take your time. Ask for help. And enjoy your creation.

It's not glamorous. And when it's a full house, there can be some bustle. But if you choose your season and the right hour, you are in for one very satisfying, chowhounding meal in the neighborhood.

Just remember to spice it right.

The "One from the Vault" feature plumbs the archives of back issues of block association newsletters for new neighbors and lovers of our community and its history.  To read others pieces from the vault, click on the category at right.


By Caitlin Hawke

It's been 10 years since that freak 15-minute storm mowed through our neighborhood. This piece recounts the hard-to-imagine tale.  Dug out from our vault, this piece appeared in the September 2008 edition of the Block Association newsletter.

The "One from the Vault" feature plumbs the archives of back issues of Block Association newsletters for the benefit of new neighbors and lovers of our community and its history.  To read other pieces from the vault, click on the category at right.


By Caitlin Hawke

I am tagging this as both "One from the Vault" and a "Throwback Thursday" because it's that delicious.

First, a big shoutout to Ginger Lief for the feature, a charming, well-researched March 2006 piece from the Block Association's newsletter vault offering up names -- many long since lost or forgotten -- of the neighborhood's buildings.  Ginger's research reveals not only the names but the reasoning behind several of them. Often harkening to places in Europe, the names tell a story about who the neighborhood's builders were, and how they left their mark.

Having done a little research, I can add to Ginger's work about the building referred to in her newsletter piece below as the "Standoche" at 855 West End Avenue.

855 West End was established as the "St. Andoche," and the name came to be mashed up into the "Standoche" in various real estate ads and municipal documents.

But the actual name is two separate words, and its significance is connected to the builder of 855 West End, a famous Civil War era actress, Maggie Mitchell. Mitchell made her fortune in the play "Fanchon the Cricket," a stage adaptation by Augustus Waldauer of George Sand's novel, La Petite Fadette.

The second act of the play takes place during a festival, the feast of St. Andoche. Mitchell's shadow dances in the play, and particularly in the second act, were adored by theater-goers and garnered her fame from Louisiana to Massachusetts and beyond.

In 1895, three years after retiring from the stage at the age of 60, Mitchell bought the parcel of land on the southwest corner of W. 102nd Street and West End Avenue and built the building that stands there -- solid as a rock -- today. Since the role helped Mitchell earn her considerable fortune, it's not a leap to understand why she tipped her hat by naming her building for it.

Click on "St. Andoche" in the list below for more.

Like 855 West End, some buildings have been featured in my Throwback Thursday posts, and you'll find those links are clickable in the list immediately below. Others are still to come. I'll update this list down the line.


Our Buildings' Names
Broadmoor: 235 W. 102nd Street at the northwest corner of Broadway
Clearfield: 305 Riverside Drive at W. 103rd Street
Friesland: 235 W. 103rd Street at the northwest corner of Broadway
Haworth: 239 W. 103rd Street between Broadway and West End Avenue
Magnolia: 240 W. 102nd Street at the southwest corner of Broadway
Hotel Marseilles: 230 W. 103rd Street at the southwest corner of Broadway
Hotel Alexandria: 250 W. 103rd Street between Broadway and West End Avenue
Ideal: 315 W. 102nd Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue
The Master Apartments (originally The Master Institute): 310 Riverside Drive at W. 103rd Street
Rockledge Hall: 299 Riverside Drive at the south corner of W. 102nd Street
St. Andoche: 855 West End Avenue at the southwest corner of W. 102nd Street


If you are a Block Association resident and your building has a name (or had a name), yet you don't see it, contact Ginger, send me an email, or leave a comment below!  Crowdsourcing comes to Bloomingdale.

Enjoy!

By Caitlin Hawke


Manfred Kirchheimer has lived in our neighborhood for 54 years and his days of glory seem just to be getting going. Manny is an 87-year-old independent filmmaker. His documentaries are direct, personal, and driven by an aesthetic sense that can find narrative, meditative beauty, and social commentary in the claw of a huge excavator or a klatch of coffee-drinking friends.

Manny is a documentarian who received a Guggenheim at the age of 85, and a year later, in 2017, was honored by MoMA with its first retrospective of his films. The series unfurled over nine days with two screenings of each of his films and a world premiere of his film “My Coffee with Jewish Friends.”  The MoMA reviews were great.

The retrospective was the brainchild of Jacob Perlin, a sort of guardian angel of cinema. Jake is the artistic and programming director down at the Metrograph, now in its second year.

A little digression here about the Metrograph, which if you don’t yet know it, is worth the trek to 7 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. Yes, you have to be able to tolerate its chi-chi side with a hipster restaurant-bar, not to mention the concessions stand which you just have to see and judge for yourself.

These revenue drivers, I suppose, are part of the business model to keep it afloat in today’s real estate market. But at its heart, the Metrograph is about cinephilia, screening archive-quality 35 mm films as well as new releases on state-of-the-art digital equipment. Quirky seating was made from reclaimed pine harvested from the now-demolished Domino Sugar factory. It’s a minimalist, gallery-type setting but that doesn’t stop the two-screen movie house from conjuring up the littlest film houses in Paris’s Latin Quarter, where you slip in and fall back in time.

The Metrograph has screened several of Manny’s films. “Tall,” Manny’s documentary about the American skyscraper and architect Louis Sullivan, ran there for five weeks and kept reeling them in.

The Metrograph-MoMA-Manny bridge is Jake Perlin. Jake became a celebrator of Manny’s work a while back and Manny now refers to him as his “agent.” The Jake-Manny story began when a cult classic of Manny’s film, “Stations of the Elevated,” went out of print from 1995 to 2014. It is known as the classic graffiti documentary.  Now a precious time capsule, it was shot over three weeks in 1977, released in 1980, and is somewhat surrealistic according to Manny. It forms a diptych with “SprayMasters,” which is about four graffiti artists in their 50s. Separated from “Stations” by 28 years, “SprayMasters” (2008) combines footage left over from the former with recent interviews of the artists.

VHS copies of “Stations” have circulated for years fueling its cult status, most recently on platforms like YouTube. Like all underground cult classics, it needed to ride again, but one major hurdle blocked it: the prohibitive cost of music rights. The score included Charlie Mingus and Aretha Franklin. To rerelease it meant to cough up $30K. That’s budget enough for two or three films, the way Manny works. So Jake rose to the challenge, got the rights, and “Stations” is back in circulation.

Perlin eventually found his way to Manny’s Broadway and W. 101st Street living room to see the documentaries on real film –- projected as they were meant to be. He quickly pulled in Josh Siegel,  MoMA's film department curator and, together at Manny’s home, they screened film after film. The idea for the retrospective was hatched and the rest, as they say, is history.

I caught up with Manny a few months ago and interviewed him. How was it to have this late career recognition? “It’s absolutely wonderful to have this moment,” he told me, “and it wouldn’t have happened at 40 years old. You have to live a long time!”

Manny retired from the School of Visual Arts in 2017 after teaching there for 42 years. He has taught for much of his career at places like CCNY, Columbia, NY Institute of Technology, and Philadelphia College of Art. But his movie-making days are far from done. “Dream of a City,” a tone poem about construction and other city phenomena, will be released soon.  He is currently editing his new film, “Middle Class Money, Honey,” based on conversations with friends and acquaintances –- from millennials to octogenarians –- about earning, spending, and their relationship to money as they live in NYC.

Manny emigrated to the U.S. at the age of five. Early on, he lived in upper Manhattan, including Marble Hill and Washington Heights. After a short decade in Rego Park, he moved to the UWS in 1964 where he raised his two sons with his wife Gloria, a partner in crime when it comes to the documentary-making family trade. For example, following Manny's documentary film "We Were So Beloved," which dealt with the history of the Jewish community in which he was raised, Gloria edited and annotated the interviews and these became the book "We Were So Beloved: Autobiography of a German Jewish Community" co-authored by the couple.

Before coming to our neck of the woods, the Kirchheimers had been looking for a new place for two years. At the time, Manny was filming “Claw” on the Upper West Side. It was Gloria who found the new apartment. Manny recalled that their original rent for seven rooms was $233, including electric. Suffice it to say, they snapped it up.

I asked him how he keeps his enterprise nimble and manageable. The secret, he says, is that he stays close to home. Because financing takes years, he keeps sets and travel to a minimum. He has a devoted crew, some of whom are his former students, and shoots only on digital these days. He can film for about $5,000 before getting to the sound mixing; that costs another $3,000. He edits the films himself -- generally a one to two-year process.

He filmed “Short Circuit” -- a rare fiction in his catalogue and dating to 1973 -- in and from his W. 101st Street apartment, much of it straight out his window. From there, his camera filmed westward straight down 101st Street to the undeveloped Jersey side of the Hudson, and south down Broadway with a good look at several old-time storefronts. Like the shot at the top of this post, the images of the neighborhood are excellent. And the documentary-style footage is remarkable for both how integrated Broadway is and the degree to which people on the street engaged with one another -- something that has been completely displaced by cellphone usage. The story is also one about complexities of race relations and socioeconomics. The following description comes from the Union Docs website where the film was shown in 2014:

"In his apartment on the corner of 101st Street and Broadway, a documentary filmmaker begins to question his interactions to the white family and black workers he shares his daily existence with. Staring out his window he begins to drift and fantasize a parallel life, which turns into a complex sound and image montage of street photography depicting a long­ since vanquished Upper West Side. Full of doubt, a lifelong city resident looks at his liberalism and doesn’t like what he sees. Constructed reality and documentary fiction, an unclassifiable masterpiece of ideas and technique that by all rights should be considered a landmark, had it not been virtually impossible to see."

One of his most well-known films, “Canners,” (2017) was largely shot on the Upper West Side. It’s about the industry begat by the 5-cent deposit on soda cans and water bottles. It’s social commentary and anthropology and art, rolled into one.

I asked Manny about the retrenchment of west side cinema, dwindling into oblivion before our eyes. He fondly remembered the 1986 screening of “We Were So Beloved” at the Metro, right around the corner from his place. And he recalled Dan and Toby Talbot, their New Yorker theater having been torn down, moving to the Metro for some years. The Talbots of course went on to build the Upper West Side's taste for foreign and independent film at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. There, this past fall, one of the last films Dan chose –- not knowing it would be Lincoln Plaza Cinema’s swansong -- was Manny’s “My Coffee with Jewish Friends,” which ran until the very last day of LPC, opening shortly after Dan passed away.

I asked him to reflect on his body of work. Like children, how could Manny point to his favorite of his films? He hedged by telling me that by financial measure, the most successful so far have been “We Were So Beloved” with “Stations” incredibly only in second place. I suspect that might change with more time.

But, he softened and replied, “Claw” was his favorite. Asked why, he explained “I think I sank my heart into it and then it came out so nicely. It’s a good film.”

You can have a look at a series of Manny's film trailers here. And keep your eye open for the next chance to see these in an art house.

Right under our noses lives Manny Kirchheimer, a filmmaker who is part of the city’s history, recording it, making it, while instructing aspiring filmmakers as to the ways of observing, commenting and documenting.

Until there’s a new house or Lincoln Center picks up on Mannymania, I guess I’ll have to say “See you at the Metrograph!”

I am embedding above a very short film on Manny made by one of his SVA students, Bianca Conti. If you are reading this in your email subscription, click on the blog post title to view this directly on the blog.

By Caitlin Hawke

The Alexandria was built as a hotel in 1916-17 and later converted to apartments. It's hard to make out but the awning below has "Hotel Alexandria" atop it in big letters -- well visible for travelers exiting the 103rd Street subway. The area had numerous hotels and the Alexandria was just paces away from the Hotel Marseilles built 11 years earlier to its east at the southwest corner of W. 103rd Street and Broadway.

The Alexandria is a 14-story classical revival stone and brick construction by architects William L. Rouse and L.A. Goldstone whose elegant work may be seen in many other buildings in these parts (Chesterfield, Allendale and Stuyvesant, to name only a few).

Live in the neighborhood and enjoy these occasional blog posts? Spread the word by telling a friend or neighbor to subscribe. There's a lot more in store!

By Caitlin Hawke

My guess is you'd have to have been born by 1960 or earlier to hear the name Vaughn Meader and begin to chuckle.  An old-time Bloomingdaler, Manhattan Mark, turned me on to this comedian and JFK impersonator whose 1962 album "The First Family" captured everyone's attention and won the Grammy for best album of the year.

It is hilarious. Good, clean, spoofing fun is made of JFK, Jackie, Bobby, Teddy, the kids and members of the kitchen cabinet.  Kids listened with their parents.  Adults popped it on the turntable after dinner parties. It flew out of stores as the fastest selling album ever with 1.2 million records sold in the first fortnight.

It was such a sensation that Kennedy quipped at one function that Vaughn Meader wasn't able to make it so he had come instead.

If you listen to the full first album at the bottom of this post (email subscribers, click on the post's title to listen to it on the website), you'll see Meader's spot on mimicry of Kennedy's accent and cadence and even the JFK wit.  It's so innocent and so clean by today's standards you'll be charmed.  And it plays as a very interesting counterpoint to contemporary comedians' take on the current POTUS.

To get to the UWS connection, the second volume, which Meader released in 1963, includes an adorable on-site interview with 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders at the Alexander Robertson School at 95th Street and Central Park West.  The first video below is teed up to take you right to the kids (you can rewind to listen to the whole record).  Make sure to listen to the first album when you have time -- the second video below.

The timing of the Volume 2 release was not felicitous, arriving in stores just a few months before Dallas. Meader's soaring popularity and lighthearted appeal had no place in the darkness and aftermath of JFK's assassination. The second album was withdrawn from stores. Meader's career never recovered, and he said that he himself also died on November 22nd.

That part of his career did go away, but Meader lived on through the tumult of the Sixties and had a few more turns to his career. He died in October 2004.

May 29th is the 101st anniversary of JFK's birth, and this is my nod to the legend that lives on.  And to a comedian whose timing was both excellent and terribly bad.

Above is an excerpt from Volume 2 featuring Vaughn Meader's visit to an elementary school on Central Park West and 95th Street circa 1962/3.  (To stream this in your browser if you are reading this via email, click here).

Above is the entire recording of "The First Family" -- Vaughn Meader's knockout comedy album of 1962.  (To stream this in your browser if you are reading this via email, click here).

By Caitlin Hawke

Note: For readers who prefer me to keep it hyper-local here on the Block Association blog, please indulge me today. It's a New York story, with traces of the Upper West Side. But it's a special occasion.


Losing Philip Roth is a body blow. I haven't processed his death yet, but I mention it because of the joy his writing has given me. Sentences that go on at the length of mini-novellas. Laugh-out-loud humor impregnating even the darkest of novels. Stories so imaginative, prophetic, true.

The magnetism of his narrative voice and sheer force of his imagination was singular.

And yet, as he'd announced and then enacted the halt of his writing career, I'd grown used to the idea that he was done producing and had chosen the Upper West Side as his home away from his Connecticut home. Over the last couple of years, there were many sightings of Roth near the American Museum of Natural History (he lived at 130 West 79th Street). And at 85, I thought hopefully, he still had a long time here with us. That comforted me.

When the Nobel brouhaha erupted recently, suspending the literature award this year, I thought: 'Philip hang in there old chap, 2019 is yours.' 

Alas, no.

Sort of like a Bizarro universe version of the Lance Armstrong Tour de France "victories" which now all have asterisks and blanks where his name once appeared, I propose that we ink in Roth for the 2018 Nobel-that-cannot-be and be done with it. Like swearing in Merrick Garland at the next possible chance. Because it's the right thing to do.

I know this is a very roundabout way of getting to Bob Dylan. And some readers may spontaneously link the two by way of the Nobel. Many felt Roth should have gotten it the year Bob Dylan did, figuring the prize committee would not name back to back US laureates. Some were outright scandalized that Dylan got it at all.

Not me. But it smarts that Roth's chances are now done.

Philip Roth and Bob Dylan are filed in the very same drawer of my brain right beside each other. Send me to a desert island and that's who I am taking. Just me and my American boys.

Their work provides a roadmap for our society. Rosetta stones decoding what it was to be American-born in the 30s and 40s. Creative consciences for when we'd veered off course. Commenters on hypocrisies peddled by politicians. And unabashed patriots whose Americanism defines them.

They are also wordsmiths unlike any others, Kilauea-like in productivity.

And so onto Bob who turns 77 today. I felt in the mood to celebrate him rightly.

I'm not asking you to like his voice. But it deserves a second listen. I'm not asking you to understand why he's not surrendered his personal life to the relentless tabloid consumer. But it merits respect and contemplation in an Instagram world, where Kardashians rule. I'm not asking you to sweep aside his 1960s self in favor of his post-Time Out of Mind full-bodied smoothness. But you could consider it. Nor would I insist you revisit the wrongly-reviled Gospel era. His born-again phase has already been born again with critics exalting it. If you live long enough, you see everything. And "Trouble No More" has been at long last deemed worth the trouble.

Bob Dylan contains multitudes, but he couldn't be what he is without his epic rise during his New York years.

Marguerite Yourcenar wrote that "the true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself."  What makes Bob one of us is that his true birthplace is New York City.

This I know.

At his post-9-11 concert at Madison Square Garden, we -- all 19,000 of us -- were broken, shellshocked sleepwalkers. No matter which song Dylan chose the night of November 19, 2001, he found a way to comment on what the city had just been through, how we felt about NYC, how senseless the attack was, how we mourned the victims. His lyrics are that encompassing. But the songwriter also chose his setlist carefully. "Waiting for the Light to Shine," "Lonesome Day Blues," "Searching for a Soldier's Grave," and finally "Things Have Changed." There were lines like the following pouring out of those songs, resonating against the 9-11 backdrop:

"Folk lose their possessions, the folks are leaving town." "I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'." "If the bible is right, the world will explode." "Some things are too hot to touch, the human mind can only stand so much." "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke."

With Ground Zero still smoldering and the spate of anthrax attacks fresh on everyone's mind, things were quite raw. And that night at the Garden, it was his references to our hometown and Dylan's own demeanor that were tenderest. With Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton alongside him and the rest of one great Dylan touring band, he launched into "Tom Thumb's Blues" with its "I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough" earning a collective roar. And then nearing the end of his performance, in acknowledgment of the roomful of pain, Dylan pronounced: 'No one needs to tell me how I feel about New York City.'

This provoked a catharsis because Dylan had just made it very personal, a rare glimpse of the flesh and bones behind the song and dance man. There are other wonderful memories of that night, but I'll keep it about New York for now. And New York Town's 77 year-old son.

In his honor on this day, I give you below Bob Dylan in a New York state of mind.

(Email subscribers: you'll have to click on the blog post title to see the videos on our site).

"Hard Times in New York Town," 1962

"Talkin' New York," live at Town Hall, 1963

"Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," 1965-66

"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," 1965 - One interpretation says this was Dylan slamming the door on the city's folk and protest singer scene. That of course could be disputed. I'm including it because it's hard to top.

"Visions of Johanna," 1966 - a slowed down live version from a Sheffield concert. The song references the D train.

I include these last two not for New York reference, per se, though the one immediately above is Bob's star-studded 30th Anniversary Concert at Madison Square Garden.  I'm posting these two renditions of "My Back Pages" as a birthday mantra: "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now...."

Happy Birthday from New York Town.

By Caitlin Hawke

This is really a Throwback Thursday post, but I am putting it up a bit early because it is pegged to an event today, Wednesday, May 23, that I wanted you to know about. But first the facts.

Yes, in the photo above, that is famed tightrope walker and master of mystery Philippe Petit walking a line to St. John the Divine on September 29, 1982, to fete the construction of a new tower. If you look closely at the grainy newspaper image below from the Columbia Spectator, you  can just about make out a trowel on his belt that he was symbolically delivering across Amsterdam Avenue -- 150 feet in the air -- to the cathedral and its Bishop. A flourish to inaugurate construction of the south tower of the cathedral's west elevation.

So, the photo above depicts an authorized -- orchestrated! -- walk to the cathedral. You don't have to imagine it because there's film of it (if you are receiving this message by email, make sure to click on the blog post title to view the video on our website). And indeed the trowel is looped on his belt as he makes his way across an unbelievably taught rope in his deacon purple stockings, pausing once to kneel on the wire and once to do a stork pose, then bowing deeply over the edge of St. John's roofline to the applauding crowd. One incredulous spectator shakes her arms over her head saying "Oh boy am I glad that's over!"

Great, yes. But let's just say it was not Petit's first walk at SJTD. That was in 1980, and he went stealth that time as was his wont.

Many a New Yorker knows Petit was a guerilla walker extraordinaire. In 1974, his clandestine operation and magnificent stroll between the two unfinished World Trade Center towers on a 131-foot cable suspended 1,300 feet above the construction site by his merry cabal was first one for the law enforcers; and then one for the history books; and finally one for the spiritual coda of those two towers whose fate we all remember too, too well. I've included two snaps at the bottom of that walk, one where he has an ear-to-ear smile, presumably elated or high on height. And the other of him lying down on the rope. He also danced on the wire that day in '74. Giddy, lollygagging about, and perhaps toying with the powers that be who had no way to get to him. That walk was an act of hubris, insanity, and majesty rolled into one.

In short, so great was Petit that his 1980 tightrope walk, which was inside St. John the Divine, led officials there to name him as one of the first Cathedral Artists-in-Residence. Better to have him with you than against you, you might suppose they reasoned. But actually, the Dean of the cathedral was all for the interior walk. He just couldn't get his board to sign off on it, presumably for liability reasons. Petit, characteristically undeterred, went ahead with the 1980 nave walk. The cops cuffed him on his way down from the wire that day for trespassing; but the Dean, James Parks Morton, intervened and thinking quickly informed the police that Petit couldn't be trespassing because he was, um, an artist in residence, right, that's the ticket.

To this day, the funambulist retains his resident artist title. And he's walked a wire many a time since including once after the terrible fire that broke out in the gift shop to help heal and herald a new beginning.

In a 1999 New Yorker piece by Calvin Tomkins, Petit was quoted as saying:

“When you think about it, wire walking is very close to what religion is. ‘Religion’ is from the Latin religare, which means to link something, people or places. And to know, before you take your first step on a wire, that you are going to do the last one—this is a kind of faith.”

Dean Morton told Tomkins that Petit was "one of the most religious people [I know]....Sometimes very unusual people turn out to be the most religious....I think of this as God’s joke.”

I do believe he believes. Just not in terrestrial authorities.

I love that he has this connection to our neighborhood. Since 9-11, Petit to me is an anthropomorphic poem. He's our living link to the towers he owned for a mid-seventies day. Religare.

In Bloomingdale, we live in the shadow of SJTD, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, or if you prefer, one of the five largest church buildings in the world. You'll agree that its secrets -- like the Petit tales -- and its history are poorly known.

One place to rectify that is with the romp of a Bowery Boys podcast episode devoted to the cathedral -- I'm embedding the audio below. (If you are receiving this by email, please click on the title of the blog post to view the video on our website.) And if you can go to SJTD tonight, May 23, for $125 you can celebrate with the Bowery Boys the 125th anniversary of the ground breaking.

Probably tickets are sold out for the birthday bash. But tell me you weren't tempted!

Replete with peacocks, Greek revival remnants of the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum of 1843, and the little rope-walking giant, the cathedral is a neighborhood gem, a work in progress, ours to cherish, and ours to divine.

The link above is to the Bowery Boys podcast #262: Secrets of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. You may not love their style, but stick with it for lots of great historical information.

By Caitlin Hawke

If you are a regular or long-time reader of this blog and know one culinary thing about me, it's my fondness for Sun-Chan. That fondness is hard to dissociate from the late co-owner, Kumiko Imamura, who died suddenly just a couple of weeks ago. It makes me terribly sad that I don't have a decent picture of her, except for in my mind where she is alive and vibrant as ever. But the picture above captures her in context and in motion, as she aways was. And the picture below shows her at far left beside Tokishige, her co-owner and husband, at work in the kitchen.

If you want to know why I was a hugely appreciative fan, you could have a look at this post or this one. And I wrote this one, stunned by the news of her loss.

On Sunday, May 20, from 2 to 6 p.m. at the restaurant on the west side of Broadway between W. 103rd and 104th Streets, Tokishige and the Sun-Chan family will hold a remembrance. If you appreciate all that is authentic, slow, down to earth, communal, and kind, you join me in mourning her.

 

Live in the neighborhood and enjoy these occasional blog posts? Spread the word by telling a friend or neighbor to subscribe. There's a lot more in store!

By Caitlin Hawke

This year's Block Association's Spring Planting Day got me thinking (click the link to see the gallery if you missed it). Where and when did this tradition all begin?

I did some digging and found an interesting piece in the NYT that seems to explain pieces of our history I'd never heard. Specifically, that our Block Association began in 1967 on West 103rd Street with a planting and beautification initiative. West 102nd Street was rolled in quickly and about four years later, the Block Association as we know it formally launched, as can be seen in our first newsletter in 1971 here.

Going back all the way to June 25, 1967, 51 years ago, the Times article below recounts how four local mothers had recently come together, mailed out letters to neighbors asking for funds for the improvement of West 103rd Street between Riverside and Broadway, and collected $1201 to buy London plane trees -- the then-favorite trees for our streets because it "grows fast and withstands city pollution."

So there you have it in a nutshell. Our Block Association's raison d'etre: the planting of trees to improve our environment. It's just second nature to the B.A. Hence the twice-yearly tradition of beautifying tree wells, of gently coaxing residents out to assist, of collecting funds to make it possible, and of liaising with the city to keep the greening going when a tree is lost or maimed.

In retrospect, it's pretty great that by the 1971 inaugural issue of the B.A. newsletter, the association already boasted 400 contributing members and had raised enough dough to plant 45 trees! Not too shabby at all.

So when you are walking around enjoying the leafing-out season, consider any tree that looks about 50 years old, and whisper an ode of gratitude to that founding crew -- starting with those four moms -- who planted and planted and planted. They made this such a beautiful neighborhood. And many continue today in their spirit, also thanks to the groundwork they laid in establishing the W. 102-103 Streets Block Association.

If you haven't stepped out or up to help the Block Association this year, it isn't too late. You can join anytime right here.

Because the image below is a little blurry, I am including a pdf file above that you should be able to click on and download.

Live in the neighborhood and enjoy these occasional blog posts? Spread the word by telling a friend or neighbor to subscribe. There's a lot more in store!

By Caitlin Hawke

Perhaps you are planning to be a vendor at this Saturday's Block Party? Good for you: you've tidied your cabinets and winnowed your closets of old items that you are now giving a chance at another good home. But a few toxins remain to be dealt with.

Or if you've been lazily watching everyone ferry their stuff to the Block Party to sell it off and you're feeling guilty that your clutter is amassing, here's an event for you.

On Sunday, you can get rid of all that hard-to-toss stuff at a SAFE Disposal Event put on by NYC's Department of Sanitation. SAFE Disposal is specifically for items that fall into the categories of Solvents, Automotive, Flammable and Electronics.

SAFE Disposal takes place on Sunday, May 20, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., on W. 120th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

Materials accepted include common household products such as auto fluids, batteries, electronics, strong cleaners, medications, paint and more.

See this link for further details.

By Caitlin Hawke

Live in the neighborhood and enjoy these occasional blog posts? Spread the word by telling a friend or neighbor to subscribe. There's a lot more in store!

The "One from the Vault" feature plumbs the archives of back issues of block association newsletters for new neighbors and lovers of our community and its history.  To read others pieces from the vault, click on the category at right.


By Caitlin Hawke

The one from the vault below by past editor of the Block Association newsletter Jock Davenport is about parking challenges. The piece is now over 20 years old but given new talk about parking garages, paying for street parking, and congestion pricing, I thought it might resonate.

Today, parking spaces cost considerably less than rent on a studio apartments (at least in this community), but much of this sounds rather familiar.  It's the time honored dance of alternate side of the street parking.

Some of you know the ASSP dance all too well, crosswords and coffee in hand or maybe it's Words with Friends.  You manage to work your schedule around this very NYC ritual.  Enjoy it while you can. 

Just not this coming Thursday, May 10, when rules are suspended for Ascension!

The "One from the Vault" feature plumbs the archives of back issues of block association newsletters for new neighbors and lovers of our community and its history.  To read others pieces from the vault, click on the category at right.


By Caitlin Hawke

New to the neighborhood or simply moved here in the last 13 years? Perhaps you've wondered about the story behind the stories of the two towers at W. 100th Street and Broadway. Wonder no more. This one from the vault written by David Reich lays it all bare.  St. Michael's was a player in the rising skyline.  That intangibly opaque thing involving the acquisition of 'air rights' added to the mix.  A key decision not to put in parking underground allowed the whole thing to move forward "as of right." And lo!  Two highrises were a fait accompli.  Yeah, I know.  The Zeckendorf's Columbia on the NW corner of Broadway and 96th was the game changer of the early 1980s.  And in the early 2010s Columbus Square transformed the Park West Village area. And I know what is now happening up on W. 108th Street.

All those carveouts (see illustration below) on the west side of Broadway in the last landmarking phase in 2015 will usher in new stories of skyscraping construction soon enough.

Some new construction will be known to neighbors in advance.  Some will squeak by under cover of night.  Of this I am sure.

(See the "As Designated" map with the 2015 landmark boundaries that exclude nearly every building on the west side of Broadway. The map "As Proposed" with the red border only carved out a few buildings by contrast.)

So, you got something to say about Ariel East and West?

Extell me about it! 

By Caitlin Hawke

A little more than three years ago, I wrote about a beautiful neighbor on this blog: Kumiko Imamura. A woman who worked as hard as anyone I've known, and always had a warm hello or good-bye and a smile.

Really, her smile started in her eyes - the smize - and then made its way across her whole face, like sun up at Sun-Chan. 

The quintessence of a hostess, she and her husband Tokishige own Sun-Chan, and Kumiko's way is to welcome you in, tuck you into her apron, make sure you have a hot cup of green tea, and take care of you while you were "hers" -- in her care at her hearth. 

If you've been to Sun-Chan, you know her hearth was, in fact, an inferno.  So this genuine hospitality was all in spite of standing long hours in the yakitori's scorching heat with constant motion around her coming from her loyal staff in a very tight space.

I wrote about her robata here and it's all still true, except it's not:

It's not true any more because tonight, I learned that we've lost this beautiful woman.

In Japanese, depending on how it's written, her name means beauty, forever, child.... To paraphrase James Joyce: She was Kumiko by name and kumiko by nature. And her loss is immense.

She weathered a terrible bout last year with the restaurant losing its gas, and she rebounded from the anguish of the saga with her arms spread wide to welcome her customers back. It's too cruel a twist that she's now gone.

In mourning, the staff and her husband Tokishige have closed the restaurant this week to bid her farewell. I understand there may be a service at the New York Buddhist Church in roughly six or seven days. If you would like details should I learn them, please leave a comment below and I'll be in touch.

I hope Tokishige and Rie and all the Sun-Chan extended restaurant family know that Kumiko is a neighbor who will be missed dearly and that Sun-Chan's community mourns alongside them all.

I won't soon forget this Queen of Queens.

With warmest thoughts of Kumiko and deep sympathies to her loved ones.

By Caitlin Hawke

Thanks go to neighbor David Ochoa for his technicolor take on "Memory" in Straus Park this past weekend and to the gardeners who maintain this jewel box. (For some history on the park, click here.) And to Mother Nature herself for the glory of Spring. Is it me or does Spring's dazzle take you by surprise every time? It's like you know it's going to be pretty, but then each year it's even better than you remember.

I haven't enhanced the picture below but I did play around with it in various filters. You may be seeing more of it down the road.  Quite a shot. Thanks, David!

By Caitlin Hawke

You may have caught last Sunday's "French Cookin' Blues Band" gig at the overlook on the promenade level of Riverside Park (at the equivalent of 116th Street a bit south of the tennis courts). And cook they did.

There are two more chances to catch a gig
in this series:

Sunday, April 29, 2 p.m.
Columbia Wind Ensemble, Jason Noble, Leader
"A big band of 50 brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments plays rousing music from the Renaissance to the present."

Sunday, May 6, at 2 p.m.
Manhattan School of Music Jazz Quintet
"These fine musicians play the best of jazz standards in their own incomparable style."

Riverside Park is the gift that gives every day. It's trees and blooms are popping. It's playfields are abustle. The tennis players are back in force. The conservancy's website has a calendar with many offerings like Tai Chi, exercise, storytime, birding and more. And of course there's the swing-a-ring lot. (A prior post featured images here).

What, I ask, is not to love?  Except maybe the white noise of the highway.

By Caitlin Hawke

Have you secured your vendor's table at our May 19 Block Party yet? All the information you need is right here. If you are a resident of the Block Association's catchment, it's just $50 for a spot from which you can turn your no-longer-needed possessions into rent money or a couple of dinners on the town.

If you are like me, you love the haggle. You love the circle-game of old things finding new life in the twinkle of a stranger's eye. You love the cash. You love the feeling of community. And you love the idea of winnowing your cupboards and drawers.

If you don't want to vend, hawk or huckster, why not just tell all your friends with overbrimming closets that this is an occasion to be seized!  For folks outside the catchment, the fee is $70.

Click on the Block Party tab on our website for an FAQ and all the deets.

And don't forget to save the date and come noodle down the street. There's deals to be had and treasures to be unearthed.

It's my favorite Block Party tradition.

(Click here to see the lagniappe video below if you are reading this via email subscription).

By Caitlin Hawke

Blow a kiss. Take a bow!

I am looking at you Mark Schneiderman (coordinator), Michael Stearns, St. Luke's, Tina, all you neighbors who lugged, mulched, dug, tidied, planted, watered, crouched, knelt, and helpfully applauded from the sidelines.  

All hail the Block Association's eco committee and your beautiful results.

Our tree wells, as shot by Celia Knight below, are ready for the throngs to come pouring through for our Block Party on May 19. (Did you reserve your table yet, vendors?).

At far bottom is a Merman lagniappe from 1961 with cameos by Lenny Bernstein and Old Blue eyes. (Remember to click on the blog title or here if you are receiving this directly in your email box.)

"We want to thank everyone for all the years of fun. It has been a journey that has meant the world to us. Please come in and see us one more time this week. I love you all. Thank you, Paul"

I really could go on (and go off) about this.  But I think I'll leave it at "Res ipsa loquitur."

Denial? I got something for you! Tuesday night, you can catch some live music at 8 p.m.

I give you Abbey Lincoln as my outro. (If you receive this via email, click here to listen to Abbey).



h/t to Terence Hanrahan for the scoop about this news.

Abbey Lincoln signs Bobby D.
(Click here if you are reading this in an email subscription).

By Caitlin Hawke

Bloemendaal by name and blooming valley by nature.

Happy Spring everyone!