Guardian Angel

Some people say our troops are heroes. Some people say we're lucky that our heroes are our troops.

Somewhere out there, a young man is visiting his family in mid-Michigan. He's wishing them a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year, because he won't be there to share it with them. He's getting together with his friends and visiting old haunts. He's telling his mom that he loves her and that he'll see her again, hopefully soon.

He won't be with them because he's in the United States Air Force, and will shortly be deployed to Iraq.

But on his way to or from his family one evening last week, he passed through the city of Flint. Perhaps he saw it happen. Perhaps he only saw what remained. But he stopped. He didn't need to; he probably had somewhere to be, and it was cold and snowing. But he stopped all the same. He could help, even if in some small way, and he wanted to help.

He pulled over in front of the wreckage of the car. He put on his military reflective vest and walked over to the driver, still trapped inside. He saw that she was conscious, but cold. He grabbed his space-blanket from his car and brought it to her and wrapped it around her. He called the police, an ambulance, and her family. He talked to her, kept her conscious, kept her alert. He called the police, an ambulance, and her family again. He told her about himself, to keep her talking. He asked her questions, engaged her answers. He made her comfortable. He kept her alive.

That young man, simply because he was there, stayed with her until the ambulance eventually took her to the hospital.

Right here, a young man is visiting his mom in southeastern Michigan. He's wishing her well, and a full recovery, and glad he can be there to share it. He's telling her he loves her and he's so grateful he gets to see her again.

To that young man, from this one, thank you. I hope to find you and tell you that you have another family who will be thinking of you while you're in Iraq, who are proud of you, and grateful to you. You are our hero.

Country Mouse, City Mouse

I find that when it comes to communities, I like the extremes. Give me a rural, wooded, empty landscape. Or New York City. Either works for me. The in-betweens, "small cities," and especially suburbs, just don't feel right to me.

On a recent weekend, I was spending time in Vermont. In many ways, it felt like Michigan's UP: small towns, rough landscape, and hardy locals. Lynn and I strolled through tiny towns, ate lunch along a crystal-clear river, and rode horses through mountain forests.

Immediately upon returning to the bustling metropolis of NYC, we had to quickly transition back to city folk. We had massages at a spa (we were celebrating our second anniversary, after all). That evening we attended the film premier of "Stone" at the Museum of Modern Art. Edward Norton was there (didn't meet him), and apparently a host of other people I probably ought to have recognized (didn't meet them). The after-party was at a swank hotel near the main public library building (think Ghostbusters) where the food was amazing, drinks unending, and coolness factor far out-matching myself.

But it was fun, all of it. I enjoyed horseback riding miles from nowhere as much as attending the premier in the metropolis. And somehow, putting them within 24 hours of each other reminded me why the two places I've explicitly chosen to live are on the opposite ends of every spectrum.

If nothing else, the extremes are interesting.

Battle of the Kittehs: Louis vs. Ella

Ladies and Gentlemen!  Fleming International brings you the all-out, hard-hitting, brawl of the century!  Two competitors will battle for superiority of sleeping spots, prime petting position, and complete dominance of the domestic domain!

Let's introduce our fighters:

In the red corner, weighing in at 12 lbs, and reigning Heavyweight Champion of the Apartment, Louis "I Was Here First" Cat.

In the blue corner, weighing just 5 lbs and barely qualifying for this class, Ella "Smaller and Faster" Kitten.

These two combatants were brought together originally to live peacefully in their shared apartment.  But that peace was soured when Louis balked at Ella's brash behavior in making herself comfortably at home in his space.  The two squared off and quickly agreed to a multi-bout tournament to determine, once and for all, which cat would reign supreme.

Louis Cat, born February 2009, is the Brute of Brooklyn.  His style is direct and forceful, right in line with a typical feline fighter.  His favorite tactic is to use his front paws to tap his opponent on the head, as if to toy with them, then pin them down with his body.  He'll give chase if he has to, but prefers the pounce-and-kick method to running around needlessly.

Ella Kitten, born May 2010, is the newcomer and is challenging Louis for the title for the first time. She's fast and light, and makes full use of the tight spaces around her to gain a tactical position.  Though inexperienced, she has a natural talent for flanking her opponents.  Her strategy of running and hiding may paint her as the weak one, but when the claws come out, she's a whole lot of sharp.

Who will take home the Champion belt?  Will experience and brute force overcome speed and agility?  Will the undercat uproot the reigning Champion?  The two competitors will take the ring each day until they determine how to coexist in the same space.  Daily bouts will go on until the referees call an end and split them up to rest for the next match.  Eventually, though no one knows how long, Louis and Ella will declare a victor or a truce.  This commentator is hoping for the latter, though I'm sure we're in for a heck of a show.

Images: Naddya Chavez

The Last Lock

I've been putting off this post.  Perhaps because I never really like it when things end.  Perhaps because I've been awfully busy keeping the two kitties from killing each other.

The last Saturday evening in August, Lynn and I headed up to the George Washington Bridge to find the last lock in the Key to the City project.  We had almost stopped by this particular lock after running around the Bronx, but in the end were too tired to continue and really wanted to head up to the GWB around sunset.  So it was left as the last thing on our list.

The bridge itself is quite remarkable in its own right, built between 1927 and 1931 and becoming the longest suspension bridge in the world for some time.  With 14 lanes of traffic (two levels), it's still the bridge with the highest vehicular capacity in the world.  The chief engineer, Othmar Ammann, built six major bridges in and around NYC, including the Verrazano, Whitestone, and Triborough bridges, which I cross often going to and from Brooklyn.  The architect of the GWB was Cass Gilbert, who I always seem to run into.  Gilbert had originally planned to encase the towers of the GWB in granite with his favorite Beaux Arts flourishes, and even put a restaurant at the top of the east tower.  However, the Great Depression delayed these plans, and eventually everyone came to love the now-iconic "bare bones" steel lattice.  They do make the bridge immediately distinguishable from any other suspension bridge.

When we arrived in the neighborhood of Washington Heights on the Manhattan side of the bridge the sun had already sunk below the horizon, but the twilight colors still stretched across the sky.  We walked up the ramp onto the pedestrian walkway and came to a gate left wide open.  This gate held the lock we were looking for at one time, but I'd heard long ago that the lock was missing and the gate was left open until midnight anyway.  But we weren't really there to open anything this time.  We were there to enjoy a beautiful view of New York from high up on the span of the bridge and the wonderful summer evening air.

It seemed natural that the end of our month-long trek to every corner of NYC should end here, with a beautiful skyline vista and a sunset to see it off.  It seemed natural that this grand tour of my home should end on the bridge that brought me in when I moved here permanently.  In many ways, this whole project has re-acquainted me with the city.  It's broken down my routine destinations and habits in favor of places I'd never been, or sometimes had even heard of.  We need that every once in a while: the chance to see our home from a different perspective and find new appreciation and astonishment in what's been there all along.

I'm grateful for the journey this project provided, and even more so for the people who shared it along the way.  Thanks Julie, for bestowing the key upon me in Times Square.  Thanks Lynn, Andy, Sandy, Sarah, and Julie (different Julie) for coming along for the ride.  And thanks Julie (yet a third), Tom, and Rachel for being game to run around the city with strangers and having a great time.


View Key to the City - GWB - 8/28/10 in a larger map

I'll Take Manhattan (Part II)

Our Friday adventure continues!  After spending some time in the Bronx, my friend from work and I headed back into Manhattan to the famous Museum Mile, a stretch of the Upper East Side where one can find many of the city's best hot dog stands--in front of museums.  One of the Key destinations was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but sadly, they only participated through the end of June.  I've heard from other Key holders that it "unlocked" free admission, which is kind of funny since the admission fee is a suggested donation anyway.  There was also a music box that a staff member would show to Key holders.  Since I only received my key the day before the museum stopped participating, I didn't really get a chance to see it, but I still wanted to stop by since it was one of the destinations.

We then walked down along Central Park to the Whitney Museum of American Art.  I'd been there once before, seven years ago, but couldn't remember much from that trip.  The lock we were looking for was on the coat check counter right by the entrance, so we went there first.  It was a simple wooden box, with a strap around it locked by a padlock.  I opened it, not really sure what to expect, and the walls of the box unfolded down flat.  Insider was a model of the new building the Whitney is going to build down by the High Line park.  The insides of each wall, now lying flat on the table, had detailed schematics of each wall of the building.  It was really cool to see, it felt like we were peering into the planning stages of the Whitney's future.

We then had the rest of the afternoon to wander the museum.  I often approach art museums with some trepidation.  I like art works, in general, but I find I rarely understand or find meaning in most modern art.  I feel like the concept of "making art" has become more about the artist's act than the art itself.  For example, one wall in the Whitney had a large canvas with markings on it made by various materials.  The markings seemed to be random, and I just couldn't find any meaning in any of it.  Nothing.  Near it was a television showing the artist "creating" it.  He had set up some metal ramps along the wall, and was climbing on these ramps while making the random markings on the canvas.  The kicker: he was climbing on these metal ramps wearing ice skates.  Yes, ice skates.  So naturally he was not having an easy time on the metal ramps, and I can only imagine the sound must have been horrendous.  And this is art.  This is inspired creation.  What?  Surely, surely, there's an easier way to make random marks on a canvas.  Perhaps I'm artistically-challenged, but I fail to see how the artist's act of creation--done in private--can be more "art" than the results of that creation, hung in a museum.  I feel like art should be judged by the people viewing it, and not have meaning imposed upon it by the artist.  This tends to put me at odds with any art that I can't make sense out of in my own head.

Same goes for one installation that was an entire floor set up for a performance.  There was a large projection screen showing what looked like old black and white video of cowboys riding horses, with random bright green dots slowly filling the screen.  In front of this was a group of musicians, consisting of a cellist and several guys with keyboards.  The cellist made the occasional scraping sounds, while the keyboardists looked incredibly busy and active producing only static and what sounded like speaker feedback.  Another floor showed videos of a woman slamming a door, with a loud door-slamming soundtrack that was out of synch with the video itself.  I was supposed to feel the artist's frustration at not being taken seriously as a young female artist.  Yet, seeing this, I really couldn't take her seriously as any kind of artist at all.

It wasn't all incomprehensible (to me) sculptures and installations.  There was one entire floor devoted to Charles Burchfield, who I came to really enjoy throughout the exhibit.  He started with a sort of realist watercolor style painting landscapes from his childhood.  Though the exhibit we could see his style change, becoming brighter, darker, then more fantastical.  His were interesting and engaging, and I found myself seeing more and more in his paintings.  There was even a room showing his throw-away doodles and drawings that he never turned into paintings, and it was fun to see what he hadn't intended to be displayed.  Thoroughly enjoyable.

Having covered the Whitney top to bottom, the plan was to jump into the subway and head down to meet Lynn near Bryant Park for the fifth and final lock of the day.  We started walking toward the subway, walked past it, and ended up walking the two miles down into Midtown to meet Lynn at a little Italian restaurant we've been to before, Via Italia.  Lynn and I ate there when she decided to move to NYC, and later when I proposed, so it's a place we tend to gravitate towards when looking for a good dinner in Midtown.

After dinner, we walked down to Bryant Park for the last destination of the evening.  By this point, night had fallen, setting the perfect scene for this particular lock.  In Bryant Park, near the 'Wichcraft kiosk we found a specific park lamp.  It looked like all the others that light up the park except for a small green box near the base with a lock on it.  On this evening, some event was going on, and we had to get just inside the barrier they'd set up to access the lock.  I opened it with my key and found a simple light switch.  I turned off the light.  Lynn then reached over and turned it back on, though it took several long minutes for it to warm up and light again.  I'd have to say this is one of the coolest locks.  These lamps are everywhere throughout the city, and it felt strangely special to be able to turn one off and on.  If any of these locks are left in place after the project ends next week, I hope this one is among them.

As promised, a map of the whole day:


View Key to the City - BX/Man - 8/27/10 in a larger map

Return to the Bronx (Part I)

So much for last Saturday being the last marathon Key to the City day.  I'd intended to run up quickly to the Bronx today to stop by the two last destinations up there.  (The first three were on a weekend trip earlier in the month.)  Instead, a friend from work joined me and we had a whole afternoon adventure, eventually hitting five of the remaining destinations--more than any other single day.

Leaving work, we ran by Union Square where Lynn and two of her work friends were having lunch.  Then we were off on the subway up to the Bronx.  I had heard that the first stop, Public School 73 was at the top of the steepest hill in the Bronx.  Thinking we might skip the uphill climb, we  took the subway one stop further than necessary in hopes of coming out on top of the hill.  No luck there.  We hard to climb a stairwell reminiscent of Montmartre in Paris to get up to the street and find PS 73.  I thought we might have struck out right away when we got to the front doors and they were locked.  Fortunately, there was an open door around the side of the building.

Boy did that bring back memories.  We walked in and immediately saw those fold-up long picnic tables, drinking fountains, and walls full of childrens' art projects.  A couple security guards (it is the Bronx after all, but there were no metal detectors or security bars to perpetuate that stereotype) showed us to the front lobby.  There, we found a display case that typically holds announcements for the students.  It was full of Key holders' notes as well, so we unlocked the case and added our own.  Mine: "School days.  Do I miss you?  NO."  My friend's: "Playing hooky from work to go back to school!"

A short walk, fortunately downhill this time, took us over to the Grand Concourse.  Our destination was deep inside the Bronx County Courthouse.  The guide book suggested that we "Be patient: security and freedom of access have to coexist."  It was referring to the very strict security measures we had to go through to get into the courthouse.  I took everything I had out of my pockets and the metal detectors still beeped; it was more sensitive than any airport I've gone through in years.

The directions were surprisingly complex, sending us down a couple hallways, to a stairway into a lower level, and down more hallways.  We walked past the Marriage Bureau where there were several couples waiting to be married, and down another hall.  At the end of it was a small plastic "quality service survey box."  Anyone could drop their suggestions in, but only with a Key could we open the box and read what's inside.  Interestingly, there were no quality service surveys, only notes from other Key holders.  We once again added our own, one reading "Nice to come in through the visitors' entrance this time!"

All five stops in the Bronx complete!  Next stop, Manhattan....

(I'll put the map on the second part of the day's adventure, in the next post.)

The Old Churchyard

A doctor's appointment across the street from a Key to the City lock? Sounds like a recipe for a quick detour!

Trinity Church (not where my doctor practices) is a historic church in the Financial District. The building there today was built in 1846, though the Trinity Church parish goes back to 1698 when the first of three churches was built on the same spot as today's. According to church records, the infamous pirate/privateer Captain William Kidd lent the runner and tackle from his ship to hoist the stones in building the first church. Today's church is no less distinguished. It was the tallest building in NYC until 1890, and served as the welcome beacon to sailors coming up the bay from the Atlantic, along with being one of the most prominent churches in the city's history.

Today the church still sits in its original land chartered property, most of which consists of the Trinity Church Cemetery. The Key to the City opens the gate to the cemetery, although on this particular day Lynn and I found it wide open as tourists and Wall Streeters alike meandered through or ate lunch in the shade.

Walking through this cemetery is like reading a laundry list of NYC street names, signers of the Declaration of Independence, members of the Continental Congresses, and prominent statesmen of the eighteenth century.  Two of the largest cenotaphs are for Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton, the former an accomplished inventor and engineer, and the latter, well, Alexander Hamilton.  I especially loved the epitaph on Hamilton's tomb:

ALEXANDER HAMILTON
The CORPORATION of TRINITY CHURCH Has erected this
MONUMENT
In Testimony of their Respect
FOR
The PATRIOT of incorruptible INTEGRITY.

The SOLDIER of approved VALOUR.
The STATESMAN of consummate WISDOM:
Whose TALENTS and VIRTUES will be admired

BY
Grateful Posterity.
Long after this MARBLE shall have mouldered into
DUST
He Died July 12th 1804. Aged 47.

Hamilton's tomb, though I'm unsure whether this was intentional or not, is on the site where a small building stood during his lifetime.  This building was the original home to King's College, which began in the churchyard, though the College had moved to its own independent building in 1760.  Hamilton began studying at King's College in 1774, and so never studied in the building that stood where he now lies.  King's College today is better known as Columbia University, where I also spent my grad school years.  Columbia claims Hamilton as its "most famous alumnus."  Though truth be told, Hamilton began leading a group of students in military drill, and in 1776 they all joined the Revolutionary Army, making him really Columbia's "most famous drop-out."

Nothing like a little walk through history on a mid-summer day.


View Key to the City - Manhattan - 8/26/10 in a larger map

Staaten Eylandt

In what was probably our last marathon Key to the City day, Lynn and I spent Saturday on Staten Island searching out the four locks there.  They were spread from the northernmost neighborhood to the very southern tip of NYC. And I'll freely admit, we blended right in with the locals by taking a car.  The island is so big there's now way we could have traversed all of the stops in one day using only the busses and single light rail line.

I'm sure I don't need to explain the stigma that is Staten Island.  It's not so much called the "forgotten borough" because it slips under the radar as it is because most New Yorkers wish they could forget it.  I'd been to Staten Island once before, and while the experience was too painful to record in the blog, that trip was referenced in this old post.  Ok, truth is, that trip happened before this blog existed--but I liked the "too painful to record" line too much not to use it.  Still, there are some truly beautiful places on the island.  Some lovely beaches, fascinating former military bases, and as I learned on Saturday, some very  historically significant sites.

Setting off in the morning, we first headed to the neighborhood of Elm Park.  This stop was another community garden, named after local Joe Holzka.  It used to be the site of an illegal casino, but was eventually turned into a source of neighborhood pride.  Our key opened the gate to a gazebo in the garden to relax in--that is, if the gates to the garden itself were not locked.  We discovered, unfortunately, that the garden is only open on alternating Saturdays.  Oops.  Undaunted, we smelled the roses through the chain-link fence and moved on.

Near the approach of the Bayonne Bridge, a few miles west of the first stop, is the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara.  Vihara, I later learned, is the Sanskrit term for monastery, though this was a house like all the other houses in this residential neighborhood.  Our key was to open the lock to the "garden maintained by the monks" behind the house.  The gate was wide open, but a typed note on the gate welcomed us to wander the garden, meditate, and come inside for tea.  We did wander the garden, and were especially interested in the Bodhi tree they had, directly descended from the original Bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment.

A little nervous, we rang the bell and were welcomed inside by a monk in orange robes.  He eagerly showed us into the shrine room with a large statue of Buddha surrounded by flowers and incense.  The floor was empty, but for stacks of pillows along the walls, and the ceiling was everywhere covered in soft paper lanterns.  We suddenly felt like we were intruding on their lives.  We tried to ask questions and engage the monk showing us around, but he seemed--not unwilling, not unfriendly--just not engaged in talking too much with us.  I'm not sure if this was a language barrier, or if we were upsetting a typical Saturday morning at the Vihara.  We tried to politely and quickly thank him, put our shoes back on, and excuse ourselves.

By this point it was time for lunch, so we opted to drive down to the very middle of the island near where our next stop, a bus tour, would begin.  This took us by the Staten Island Mall, the destination of my first fateful trip into Staten Island.  Being the most suburban-like part of NYC, and since we were near a real suburban-like shopping mall, Lynn was hoping for an Olive Garden for lunch.  Would you believe that although there are two Olive Gardens in Manhattan, there is not a single one in Staten Island?  I'm amazed, too.  Still, we found another typical suburban chain we hadn't been to in ages, Outback Steakhouse.  Closed.  Next door was another, closed.  Who knew Staten Island didn't wake up before 1pm on a Saturday?  We finally ended up at TGI Fridays.  Oh yes, yes we did.

It was then time to meet the bus for our third destination, Freshkills Park.  Why a bus?  Well, the park isn't technically open yet, though they're giving tours of parts of it to let the public know what's going on.  Freshkills Park is more commonly known by its previous name, Freshkills Landfill.  It received most of NYC's daily trash from 1947 to 2001, and is the largest landfill in the world.  As our guide said, if you lived in or visited NYC during the fifty-four years it was open, your trash is in there somewhere.  Today the landfill is closed, and almost completely capped off.  The city is turning it into a 2,600 acre park, the largest in NYC.  The tour was pretty interesting, we drove up onto two of the capped "mounds" and saw the views out over most of Staten Island.  Meanwhile, our guide told us the history of the landfill, trash collecting in NYC, and how the Parks Department is slowly turning it into what will be great parkland with lots of amenities.  Our key unlocked a case in the front of the bus, inside of which were the largest pair of binoculars I'd ever seen.  Through them we could just barely make out the Lower Manhattan skyscrapers in the haze off in the distance.

Sitting in the row behind us on the bus, was a couple from London on--if you can belive this--their honeymoon.  Yes, they crossed the Atlantic to honeymoon in the least interesting borough of NYC on a pile of garbage.  Well, mostly.  She's working on a sewage reclamation project in London that will create a park around a terribly-polluted stream in the East End, so they worked this little side trip into their otherwise quite romantic NYC holiday.  We got to chatting with them, and enjoyed our time on the tour bus even more for it.  They loved the idea of the Key to the City project, so we invited them to come along with us to the final stop of the day.  Quite surprisingly, they accepted.

So, off we were with our British captives--friends!--to the very southern-most tip of Staten Island, the Conference House Park.  We parked the car, and walked down a gravel path past an old stone house to a beautiful wooden pavilion right on the beach.  It overlooked Raritan Bay, and out to the Atlantic Ocean.  I've been to NYC beaches before in the Rockaways and Coney Island, but this was completely different.  It felt more like a campground in some woodsy park far from anything that could be called city.  On the beach was a woman walking her horse into the water to bathe, and shells washed ashore from the bay.  Our key unlocked a door under the pavilion to let us into the space below it.  There we found tickets for free admission to tour the Conference House, the stone house we'd walked past on the way.

We went up to the Conference House, and I'm so glad we did as it was the best part of the whole day.  Walking around the house with our British friends, I learned that the guy was an architect.  It was incredible to circle this old house with him as he thought out loud about the way the stones were set, pointed out where windows had been removed, and clearly discerned what was original to the house and what was added on or upgraded later.  We managed to get in on the very last tour of the day (it was late afternoon by this point), with a couple other people who were clearly also enthusiastic about history.

I've always taken an interest in the history of places I've lived, and New York has been a veritable treasure chest.  I love finding little pieces of history everywhere here and learning their stories.  I've read extensively on the city's origins, the early settlements, and its role in American history.  A big part of that role was during the Revolutionary War, where in the Battle of Long Island George Washington famously lost NYC to the British and retreated north.  That battle occurred where I currently live, and during his retreat Washington made fortifications in northern Manhattan where I went to grad school and where Gracie Mansion would eventually be built.  It's a fascinating story of how the American patriots nearly lost the Revolutionary War, or as our new British friends insisted on calling it, the Civil War.  Ah, perspective.

Somehow, though, I missed the Conference House.  I'd never read about it, and indeed had never even heard of it.  Built as a country manor sometime before 1680, by the time of the Revolutionary War it had been commandeered by Lord Howe, commander of the British naval fleet in America.  Howe had been somewhat sympathetic to the colonists in the past, and so he was chosen to engage in the one and only session of peace talks between the two sides.  A peace conference was brokered between Howe and the Continental Conference to occur at Howe's residence.  On September 11, 1776, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge rowed across the bay from New Jersey, and were led up to the Conference House.  They met with Howe in the parlor to the left when you walk in the front door.  There's no official record of the discussion, but after three hours, the three politely refused Howe's offer of peace, and so the war raged on for another seven years before the British conceded their colonies to the new United States of America.

The house itself was just as fascinating as its story.  Our tour guide was the caretaker of the house, and lived in a part of it that had been added on in the nineteenth century.  She was new, the usual guide hadn't shown up that day, and it was the last tour of the day, which meant we were all very relaxed and she was hilarious.  She led us through the main and upper floors of the house, where period furniture and everyday items were placed as if someone lived there still.  Down in the basement kitchen, quite unlike every other historic house I've ever toured, we were encouraged to look around and touch things.  Three hundred year old pots and pans?  Check 'em out!  Eighteenth century contraption in the corner?  We have no idea what this is, come play with it and see if you can figure it out!  It was awesome.  If for any reason you go to Staten Island, take this tour.

Our planned destinations all visited, it was time to return to more familiar territory.  Our new friends had become good friends, and so we went out to dinner with them in our neighborhood.  And naturally, ice cream followed.  The cool thing about this Key to the City project has been going to all of these places I'd never visit otherwise.  But the best part is meeting all of these amazing people along the way.


View Key to the City - Staten Island 8/21/10 in a larger map

From the Mayor's Mansion to the End of the Line

Another day, another Key to the City adventure.  Lynn and I managed to take a tour over our lunch break, then I took off to the far reaches of southern Brooklyn in the evening.

Our lunch destination was Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of the City of New York.  This is another of the many places on this project that I've meant to see before but never got around to it.  The house was beautiful--I do love the Federalist style!--and the tour was really enjoyable.  Our two guides were great, and they told many anecdotes of the families who lived in the house before it became city property as well as the Mayors and their families.  My favorite part was seeing a British Revolutionary War cannon ball on a mantelpiece in the main parlor.  It was discovered in the ground while the mansion was being renovated, having done its part in destroying the house that stood there before Gracie Mansion was built.

Our key opened a closet upstairs in the master bedroom.  The whole upstairs is traditionally the residence of the Mayor, but since our current Mayor Bloomberg opted to reside in his own house, the second floor has been opened to the public.  Inside the closet was a portrait of Archibald Gracie, who built the house and lived there until his sons lost it in a business venture.  Also there was the original check Gracie wrote to purchase the property--in 1798.  Our tour guide explained these things, and showed us a real NYC Key to the City.  I'll have to find a way to earn one of those some day.

Later in the evening, I jumped on the subway and followed it to the end of the line.  Four subway lines end at Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island.  The huge subway station there pours riders out into the thick of the Coney Island beach atmosphere.  There are food stands, beach stores, and of course, the original Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs.  A block away and you're on the iconic boardwalk with all the arcades, stands, music, and rides.  There's also sand, and some water too.  This lock was not amidst all that, but one avenue north in the more practical part of Coney Island.  Here are the real stores for the people who live there, and the places they go--like the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

This was the first time I've struck out on my own to find a lock, and coincidentally it turned out to be a good one for it.  I found a metal safe box on a reference shelf that matched my key.  Inside was a whole history of Coney Island.  Newspaper articles stretching back a hundred years, a printed history of the early settlements on what was once literally an island (today it's only an island in name, landfill attached it to the mainland of Brooklyn long ago).  There were artifacts as well, including an old tin can of Coney Island brand sea food, that was once quite popular, and an early electrical conductor found preserved on the ocean floor off-shore.  It was a good place to sit, read, and learn.  Who would've thought?  I went to the library and ended up reading.

I visited the beach, which was empty as it was both late in the evening and starting to rain.  I was so close, I just had to go see the ocean.  And of course, stopped for dinner at Nathan's.

Today marks two milestones in the Key to the City adventure.  First, Gracie Mansion marks the 12th lock opened, meaning the Coney Island library took me beyond the half-way point to opening every single lock.  Second, Coney Island finishes off all the locks in Brooklyn, the second borough completed.  Time is short to reach all of the locks by the end of the project, September 6th.  But with some good planning, I may just make it.


View Key to the City - Man/BK - 8/18/10 in a larger map

Pieces of Brooklyn

The great Key to the City adventure continues.  Rather than have another marathon adventure, we opted to break the Brooklyn locations up among several days.

The very next day after our Bronx adventure, Lynn and I jumped on the subway for the quick trip over to the Brooklyn Museum.  Neither of us had been here before, so we didn't know what to expect, but it was a really good experience.  Our favorite exhibits were the full-scale replicas of actual colonial houses, built within the museum halls.  It was really cool to walk around these houses as if you were actually inside.  We eventually found our way to the top floor, where our key opened a secret door in the wall between two portraits.  Inside was a secret exhibit, just for us: a small collection of tiny Fabergé sculptures.  I didn't know that the House of Fabergé made things other than the famous eggs, but there were some great little sculptures here.  Tiny animals make of precious stones with diamond eyes, a miniature jewel-encrusted clock, and a life-size dandelion gone to seed, made of asbestos filaments.  It was a cool surprise, behind a secret door.

The following day, we ventured out again.  After work, we headed down to the Gowanus Canal, a highly-polluted body of water a short walk from our neighborhood.  This formerly industrial area is now dotted with artist studios, galleries, workshops, and performance spaces.  Right along the canal are the offices of Cabinet Magazine, a quarterly art and culture publication.  Our key unlocked a small box in the dark alleyway beside Cabinet.  Upon opening, the empty box played an old recording of "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," a Tin Pan Alley hit song from 1919.  A note in the box said, "For the full experience call 718-XXX-XXXX between the hours of 10am and 6pm."  We'd arrived well after 6pm, but I later looked up what other keyholders had said about the location.  There used to be a bubble machine above the box that would start blowing bubbles when the box was opened.  It broke some time ago, so the folks at Cabinet decided to put their phone number in the box.  If we had arrived in time, and called the number, someone would have come running out into the alleyway to blow bubbles for us.

A week went by, with us traveling and some thunderstorms passing through, and the following Tuesday we once again set off after work.  This time, our destination was right along the way home, up in DUMBO.  We climbed a stairway off the street up to the entrance of Gleason's Boxing Gym.  The place was alive with the sound of solid impacts, and the distinct smell of hard work and sweat.  Gleason's is the oldest continually operating boxing gym in the country, and champions of all classes have trained there.  Cassius Clay, Mike Tyson, and a host of other boxing legends have trained here, and their pictures cover an entire wall in the back of the main room.  Individual lockers are scattered throughout along the walls, and one of them could be opened with our key.  Inside were boxing gloves, jump ropes, tape, and everything we'd need to get started ourselves.  We tried the gloves, but long days of work convinced both of us not to stay long.  On our way out, we were completely surprised to be approached by one of our new neighbors, himself training hard after a long day at work.  What a pleasant surprise.

There's one more location in Brooklyn, way down in Coney Island.  It has more difficult hours to work with, so we're not sure when we'll make it down there.  Tomorrow, the adventure continues in Manhattan, where we still have many more secrets to unlock.


View Key to the City - Brooklyn in a larger map

Upstate NYC

Continuing with the Key to the City project, Lynn and I ventured out again this weekend to find some more locks to open.  This time we headed way up north, to the Bronx.  There are five locks in the Bronx, but two of them are only available during business hours on weekdays.  We haven't quite figured out how we might visit those yet.  Three others we could get to, however, and there were a couple in northern Manhattan if we had extra time.

The beginning of our adventure took us to the Grand Concourse near Yankee Stadium.  The Grand Concourse was supposed to be the Champs-Élysées of the Bronx, a wide boulevard with tree-lined dividers, running up through Bronx four miles all the way to Van Cortlandt Park.  For a time, it was the height of middle-class living in NYC.  But like much of the city, and especially much of the Bronx, rapidly declined in the 1960s.  Today, however, it's doing very well again, and we walked passed a couple very tempting restaurants serving brunch on our Saturday excursion.

Three friends meet at their mailbox.

The first stop was PostNet, which is a pretty standard printing/copying/shipping place.  To the left after entering is a wall of post office boxes, and our key opened box 136.  Inside were messages people had left, and interestingly, messages people had mailed to the PO box directly.  As we stood reading some of these, we noticed a woman sitting in the only chair next to the PO boxes, looking at a subway map and writing in her notebook.  She smiled at us and said she was a fellow keyholder, and we quickly struck up conversation.  A fast friendship was formed, and we invited her to join us on our Bronx adventure.

....unless you have a key.

The newly formed trio trekked east to the neighborhood of Melrose.  Melrose is one the largest Puerto Rican communities in NYC, and sadly, also one of the poorest neighborhoods.  Throughout the 1970s, the neighborhood was synonymous with arson, and most of the residential buildings were damaged or destroyed.  Much of what exists now has been rebuilt by the NYC Housing Authority as low-income and subsidized housing.  Our destination was the Centro Cultural Rincon Criollo, a community garden on a quiet street right in the middle of the neighborhood.  It was lovely, lush and green plots surrounded a small green club house in the middle.  There were many people spending a relaxing Saturday afternoon in the garden, and they all waved to us as we searched for the garden plot that our key unlocked.  We found it behind a large "No Trespassing - Prohibido El Paso" sign, but the garden was as welcoming as could be.  Fresh cabbage, peppers, tomatoes, and grapes grew all around, and were watched over by a whimsical scarecrow.  It was easy to see how such a place could bring the people here together, and we felt grateful to be welcomed into their lush treasure.

Moving further east to the shores of the Bronx River, our last destination in the Bronx was The Point Community Development Corporation.  This was in Hunts Point, another of the most difficult neighborhoods in the Bronx.  Here, more than 60% of the population is unemployed, and the average income is less than half the national average, making Hunts Point part of the poorest congressional district in the entire country.  There are essentially two main businesses here, it is home to one of the largest food distribution centers in the world, and three detention centers.  Still, like everywhere, the people make due and enjoy life as well they can.  Several small parks have popped up, and a few small businesses have opened, and are trying to engage the community.

Building boats

One of these is called Rocking the Boat.  It was started by a man named Adam Green, who Lynn and I first heard about when he was the subject of a "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" episode.  (Don't judge.)  The program allows high school kids in the neighborhood to learn practical, leadership, and life skills by building wooden boats from scratch over the course of a school semester.  They plan the work, they do the work (all of it, from chopping wood to painting the name on the stern), and then they run a program where locals can take the boats out on the Bronx River on weekends.  The main entrance to the lock we were looking for was closed the day we arrived, and a note directed us to the dock where the Rocking the Boat staff were renting out their boats.  A nice woman there offered to take us through their building into the courtyard where we'd find a door we could unlock.  Along the way, she gave us an impromptu tour of their boat workshop, which was very cool to see.

Art inside

Behind the building lay a courtyard with a garden, some portable classrooms to teach the city-born kids how to operate their boats, and a small brick shed.  A rusted door held the lock matching our key, though we mistakenly went in through a second, unlocked back door.  We opened it, turned on the lights and found color.  Bright colors shouted at us form all directions.  This building was a piece of art itself.  A table stood in the middle with paints, brushes, markers, crayons, papers, glues--everything you could want to make something fun.  And those who had come before us certainly had.  There were paintings on the walls, ceilings, and floor.  A web of yarn made it an enjoyable challenge to get from one end of the room to another.  Papers were everywhere with drawings and messages.  We rolled up our sleeves and dug in, leaving a message (me), a drawing (Lynn), and a painting on the wall (our new friend).  I'm running out of synonyms for "fun," but it was truly, and simply, kid-creative fun.

Under Construction, 118 years and counting

Realizing there was much more light left in the day, we decided to head over to Manhattan to open one more lock.  We went down to Lynn's and my old neighborhood of Morningside Heights.  We even stopped right in front of the apartment I lived in while attending Columbia University.  A quick walk around the corner took us to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the fourth-largest church in the world.  Although the inside is breathtaking, the outside is still under construction--having been started in 1892.  (There's a neighborhood joke about Saint John the Unfinished.)  Two world wars and a devastating fire have plagued the construction of the church, but it continues to this day nonetheless.  Much of the nave was off-limits and under construction when I lived in the neighborhood, so this was the first time I could see it all open.  And open is a pretty accurate description; the ceiling was 124 feet above us.  It's a beautiful, quiet place, and we wandered the whole church before even starting to look for the lock.  At last we came to a gate, padlocked with a velvet rope.  Unlocking the gate let us into the Baptistry, which was a gift to the church from the descendants of Peter Stuyvesant.  Peter was the last governor of the New Amsterdam colony, right up until it became New York.  The Baptistry was quiet, and empty, and we enjoyed the peacefulness.

Tired, and in desperate need of milkshakes, we ended our journey at one of Lynn's and my old haunts, Tom's Restaurant.  Most notable for being the external shot of the diner in "Seinfeld," it's also a neighborhood favorite for the milkshakes, late hours, and friendly staff.  Being almost exactly between our two apartments when we were in grad school, Lynn and I frequently met there at all hours.  The owner, who will chat your ear off if you let him, recognized us when we walked in and sternly asked me where I'd been for the last three years.  We had our shakes, and chatted more, ranging from our lives in New York to cultural differences (our new friend is French, and lived in Paris and Guadeloupe).  It was a pleasant end to another grand adventure.

PS: Map!

View Key to City - Bronx/No. Manhattan - 8/7 in a larger map

Adventures in Queens

A while back, I received a Key to the City.  Not quite the gold key in the nice box presented by the Mayor, but rather, a normal key that opens locks all around the city.  It's the Key to the City project, from artist Paul Ramirez Jonas.  The concept is two-fold: to bestow keys to the city to everyday people for their everyday works, and to give the city back to those people by making the keys actually unlock something.

When I went to Times Square to get my key, I had no idea the production that it would it be.  There was a little park set up in the square, and those present were paired off if they didn't come with someone.  I was paired with a sweet woman named Julie, and we chatted as we waited for our turn.  Finally, we went into the little park together, and met volunteers running the project.  They pulled out huge ledgers for each of us, and we went through a whole ceremony for bestowing a key to each other.  I gave her a key for her contributions to theater in New York (she's worked in theaters all her life).  She gave me a key for courtesy and caring, saying I was the nicest person she had met that day. (Aw, shucks.)

What do the keys open?  With the key, we also got little passports that have descriptions and maps of how to find the locks, but not what's inside them.  There are twenty-four locks spread throughout all five boroughs.

This past weekend, two good friends of ours were in town.  And as part of a real NYC adventure, we decided to start finding some locks and see what happened.  We hit all four of the locks in Queens, along with another friend who had recently moved there.  We started in Astoria at the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden, which is exactly what it sounds like.  Grilled brats, large mugs of beer, and all in a nice big open space where they have music and dancing in the evenings.

Hey, Pops
The first lock was in a place I'd been meaning to visit since moving here, the Louis Armstrong House Museuem.   It's way up in Corona, a little ways from LaGuardia airport.  The tour we took was great, and the house has been amazingly preserved from when Louis and Lucille lived there.  As a trumpet player myself, it was amazing to see so intimately into the life of an idol, though Lucille clearly had all the say when it came to most of the house!  Still, Louis had a den on the second floor in the front of the house that was his, and you could almost feel him there.  His big desk, his tape recorders (he recorded everything, even everyday conversations), the pictures on the wall, it was all him.  There's a little balcony off the front where he'd play to the neighborhood kids.  The museum had taken some of his recordings from certain rooms and put in speakers to play them in those rooms.  In his den, for example, they played a recording of him sitting at his desk playing his horn along with some music.  You could feel his energy and charm, and I just wished I could have seen him in life.

Louis was undoubtedly a character, too.  He loved bawdy jokes, and collected them like stamps.  The museum played one recording from the living room, where he had his niece recite "Mary Had a Little Lamb."  She did, then he replied with his own version: "Mary had a little bear, and he was mighty fine. And everywhere that Mary went, you saw her bear behind!" to the laughter of his niece and himself.  He laughed a lot.  He also was a big proponent of laxatives, and absolutely swore by Swiss Kriss herbal laxatives, going so far as to give them to the Royal Family when he went to London.

The basement of the house has mostly been turned into the exhibition space for the museum, showing off pictures, a trumpet, clothing, and other effects.  But one room has been left exactly the way it was when Louis himself used it for extended periods of time with his Swiss Kriss.  This room is not on the tour, and not open to the public, but the Key to the City opens the door.  It's his downstairs bathroom.  And sitting on the sink is a photo of him in that bathroom, facing away form the camera, with a clear view of his--ahem--bear behind.

Daniel Dromm's Flag
The second stop was the office of New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm, in Jackson Heights.  His office was closed, being the weekend, but the key unlocked a display case next to the front door.  The case displays an American flag, but behind it previous key holders have left messages and small tokens.  It was a neat, quick stop, but we were admittedly distracted by the myriad of ethnic shops and restaurants on Roosevelt Avenue.  Queens is one of the most diverse boroughs in the city, and neighborhoods there change drastically from generation to generation.  It's fascinating.

Nixta-what?
Not realizing the geography of our trek, we then ventured back to Corona for stop number three, Tortilleria Nixtamal.  This place was awesome.  We got a table to sample the food, placed our orders, and then asked where the lock was.  We were escorted to the back and told that our key would unlock the two doors there, and we could pick which one.  (The one on the right was the bathroom.)  We opened the door on the left, and followed the stairwell on the other side down into the basement.  We squeezed through sacks of fresh corn piled up to the ceiling and into the small kitchen, where everything is made from scratch.  Our waitress showed us the machines for washing the corn, and cooking it into nixtamal.  They then crush this into a dough, and press out flat circles.  These are then tossed onto a skillet for a few minutes, and become delicious corn tortillas.

We were already impressed and thought this was a pretty amazing process to see first-hand.  Then our waitress left us with the cooks, who gave us a bowl of nixtamal and said we were going to make our own tortillas.  We had fun rolling out our tortillas tossing them on the skillet.  I tore my tortilla on the skillet trying to turn it, but everyone's came out great.  We all nibbled on our freshly-made tortillas back up the stairs to our table, where we had some great food (the tostados were fantastic).

Back in Time
Having already eaten our way through half of Queens, we headed down to Forest Hills (home of Peter Parker!) for the final stop of our adventure.  Eddie's Sweet Shop has been serving up homemade ice cream at their soda fountain counter for over one hundred years.  Just walking in the door feels like traveling through time, and you're slightly embarrassed by your own funny clothing.  But the sundaes more than make up for it.  Here our lock opened a small safe box the staff held behind the counter.  Inside were notes and memories of other key holders who had come before.  Some were inspirational snippets, some were professions of love, and some were simple drawings.  We each wrote our own notes, ate our ice cream, and reflected on our exhausting but wholly enjoyable day in Queens.

*Update: Now with a map!

View Key to City - Queens in a larger map

All A-Board

I've spent a lot of time lately explaining the difference between a co-op and a condo here in NYC to friends and family.  In a nutshell, it breaks down into what you own.  In a condo, you own your unit from the walls inward.  It is yours, you are a property owner, and you can (generally) sell it to whomever you like and do whatever like to it.  In a co-op, you own a share of the controlling interest in the building proportionate to the size of your unit, and you hold a permanent lease on your unit to live in.  So the apartment is not your property, and the co-op has a great deal of say in who you can sell it to and what you can do to it.

Fortunately, I now live in a condo.  Condos are rare in NYC, for reasons that aren't particularly clear to me.  Co-ops seem to be the norm in this town.  So I consider myself pretty lucky to have found a good one.  Still, both condos and co-ops are overseen by a Board of Directors.  In a co-op, the Board has near-limitless power, since they control essentially the whole building.  In a condo, the Board is not quite so omnipotent, but is still responsible for building management, maintenance, and generally keeping all the residents happy.  After all, someone needs to actually run the building.

Last week, we had our first Unit Owners meeting, where everyone in the building got together for the first time.  At this meeting were the Sponsor (the developer who built the building) and his lawyer, who officially transferred control of the building to the Owners (us).  The first thing we then had to do was elect our three-member Board of Directors.

At this point I should mention, everyone in this building is pretty cool.  Everyone I've met so far has been really nice, very open and welcoming.  It really makes me feel even better about living here.  Many of them are just like Lynn and I, young first-time homeowners.  I suppose that last one is actually the one possible downside: no one has owned an apartment, so no one has any condo or condo board experience.

Still, we had to elect a Board, and elect one we did.  Five of us volunteered, based on interested more than experience (since there was none among us).  We held sheets of paper in front of us with our unit numbers, and stood in a line along the wall in front of everyone, like a police line-up.  We went down the line telling a little bit about ourselves and what experience might be relevant.  And everyone voted on the neighbors they just met, based solely on those few minutes of talking.  I was elected, along with another guy on my floor, and the guy who lives directly above me.  The only thing we knew was that we had our work cut out for us.

And it's true.  We met for the first time, and are still in the process of even identifying all the things we have to take care of.  It's a long list that includes everything from hiring someone to take out the trash to dealing with bank accounts and financial stability and buying a grill for the roof deck.  But though I'm not exactly sure what's next yet, I'm really confident about this.  The three of us are all on the same page, we get along really well, and we're all having fun figuring out what we're supposed to be doing.  It'll be an interesting experience, but a good one.

Best of all, we're creating a community in our little building.  And we're off to a great start.

Disputed Territory

When I first came to NYC, back in 2003, it was my dream to get an apartment right in the middle of things.  I idolized, as so many transplants do, the Village.  Little did I know what geographic trouble I was getting myself into.  The original Village, Greenwich Village, was centered in what is today known as the West Village.  To the east, appropriately, is the East Village--which was originally part of the Lower East Side but renamed for real estate appeal long ago.

I settled in a little studio on Waverly Place and Mercer St.  When people asked me where I lived, I said "the Village," marveling at how incredibly cool that sounded.  But then they'd say, "East or West?" and I was stumped.  Some people insist the dividing line between East and West is Broadway.  Others swear that it's Fifth Avenue.  Maps, even official-looking city maps, are just as fickle, saying one, the other, or sometimes referencing both.  Mercer Street, were I lived, is right in between Broadway and Fifth Avenue.  Thus, each time I tried to describe where my little apartment was to anyone who lived in the city, it generally sparked a long--and often heated--debate on the boundaries of the Village.

Never one to shy away from cartographic controversy, I now find myself in a similar neighborhood border situation.  Our new apartment in Brooklyn sits between two prominent north-south streets, Court Street and Smith Street.  These streets are both labeled by several sources, maps, neighborhood guides, and city resources as the dividing boundary between the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill to the west and Boerum Hill to the east.

Cobble Hill was originally known as Ponkiesbergh, and was settled in the 1640's by the Dutch farmers in the area.  It gained its current name from being a small hill (the highest point is at today's intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street) where cobble stones were disposed.  These stones were used as ballast in the trade ships coming from Europe, and were not needed when the ships left New York laden with American goods, so they were dumped in what was then just outside of the town of Brooklyn.  Althought grouped into the generic "South Brooklyn" designation with everything else south of Atlantic Avenue for many decades, the name Cobble Hill has been in city documents since as early as the 1840s.  The high point itself was even used as a fort during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, though nothing remains of either today.

Boerum Hill, meanwhile, has a slightly more quiet history.  The area was named after the Boerum family whose farm covered most of the area in colonial times.  Its development followed closely along with Cobble Hill.  Some folks will tell you the name "Boerum Hill" is a product of gentrification in the area, like DUMBO or calling Hell's Kitchen "Clinton."  This is because, like Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill was lumped into the "South Brooklyn" designation well into the 1950s.  However, there are plenty of records showing the name "Boerum Hill" going back as far as the colonial farm itself.  So while the name may have been resurrected after South Brooklyn lost its appeal, Boerum Hill was the original name given to what is now the neighborhood.

Interestingly, in the early 1920s a large group of Mohawk families moved to Boerum Hill from a reservation in Quebec.  They came to NYC as ironworkers to build the new skyscrapers as, unlike their European-American neighbors, they were comfortable working at the dizzying heights of the tallest buildings in the world.  But as crane and building technology improved, the Mohawks eventually left as well, heading west where there was more work available.

So which neighborhood should it be?  I see one strong argument for each.  Historically, the actual hill that Cobble Hill refers to was centered on what is today an intersection of two streets one block away.  That puts our building literally "on" Cobble Hill, so it would make sense to call it "in" Cobble Hill as well.  On the other hand, the city government draws the line between Community Board 2, which includes Boerum Hill, and Community Board 6, which includes Cobble Hill, along Court Street.  This means that, as far as our representation in the city government is concerned, we're in Boerum Hill.

Though I suppose I could avoid the issue entirely, since nearly everyone in Brooklyn knows exactly what I mean when I say I live "around the corner from Trader Joe's."  As for the Manhattan dwellers, all I have do is say "Brooklyn" and watch their eyes glaze over.

Episode IV: A New Home

The great Suburban Exile of 2010 has ended.  After a month of living off in the 'burbs and commuting into the city, we're finally settled in our apartment.  That we own.  But it wasn't easy getting there, naturally.

Once June had hit and we were living in Connecticut, we had a new deadline to worry over.  June 30th was the last day we could close to claim the several-thousand-dollar First Time Home-buyer Tax Credit that the government began early last year as part of the larger economic stimulus.  We had the usual runaround, hearing "of course we'll make it," and, "don't worry about it."  But that's what we heard in March.  And April.  And May.

While our bank had pulled its approval of the building, another bank had gone ahead and approved it.  That bank closed several apartments in the building and our future neighbors started moving in.  We abandoned our bank, and started from scratch with this other bank that had approved people.  The new bank was wonderful; they accomplished in a week what the first bank to two months to do.  They rushed everything through for us, and all was moving quickly.

But not quickly enough.  June was flying by, and we were getting closer and closer to losing the tax credit.  Delay after delay we could handle, albeit grudgingly, but losing the credit would have been an extra slap.  Finally, as the end of June neared, our lawyer, the bank's lawyer, and the building developer's lawyer set a date to close and hoped that we'd have the final green light from the bank by then.  That date was June 30th, 10am.

Around 10pm on June 29th, we got a call from our lawyer.  We're going to close!  Probably.  There was some confirmation of funds transfer from the bank that we needed, and that hadn't come in yet.  Our lawyer told us to be ready at 10am, but not to show up at the closing table until he called.  Just in case.

The next morning we had our final walk-through in the apartment before the closing.  We walked around looking everything over one last time.  But mostly we were just wondering, would this really happen?  10am came and went.  10:30am came and went.  Finally, the phone rang, and we were off to the closing table.  Two hours, and many signatures and people shuffling, later we were homeowners.

Wasting no time, we immediately scheduled the movers for the following Monday and painted over the weekend.  It's good to be home.

Suburban Exile - Day 17

I was thinking I would post often about the exciting suburban life of Stamford, CT.  I thought I would have a lot of richly humorous stories about the people and ways, navigating the winding streets and sprawling shopping centers.

Nope.

With a commute ranging from one and a half to two hours each way, I find that I'm not doing a whole lot of living while living in Stamford.  Each morning, I wake up by 5:30am, so that we can both be ready to drive to the train station at 6:30am.  After work, by the time we're back at the house, it's nearly 8pm.  Sometimes later.  Exhausted from full days of work and traveling, there's generally enough time for dinner, some reading, and then sleep.

I don't mean to complain too much.  The truth is that we're still saving quite a bit of money living out here, paying no rent, utilities, and little for food.  It's been great to spend more time with family, and we've been very fortunate to have the kind of family we do.  Even the cat and dog have begun to peacefully coexist in the same room.

But at the end of the day, I can't wait to get back to Brooklyn.  On that front, we've applied with a second bank, giving up on the first one's incompetency altogether.  The application, up through the appraisal report, was all rushed through in eight days.  So now we're waiting, just as were before, for the final green light to close.

Fingers crossed (again).

The Suprising Power of Twitter

I'll be the first to admit, I was very skeptical of Twitter when I first heard about it.  Yet another social network?  Wait, you're telling me this one is just one-way short messages blasted out to the world with no context?  Hold on now, they're limited to 140 characters?  Why in the world would anyone care what I have to "tweet" about.  And why in the world would I want to "follow" anyone else when I have Facebook?

Eventually, though, I joined Twitter a little over a year and change ago.  But I had an excuse!  It was for work!  Slowly, I came to like the immediacy of it, especially in how it could surface trending links on the web that were interesting or funny.  Eventually, I plugged it into Facebook so that when I tweeted something, that tweet also became my Facebook status.  I did this because I have a Blackberry Curve phone, and the Facebook app for Blackberry is not the easiest thing to use, but the Twitter app was great.  These days, I find I use Twitter differently from Facebook.  It's easy to have short, quick, conversations.  It's still useful in finding interesting and funny content out in the wild.  And it's a useful way of sharing things that I find interesting.  And you know what, it turns out I do care what some of my friends are tweeting.  More surprisingly, they care about what I'm tweeting.

But I've only recently come to a stunning and powerful discovery.  Twitter, more than any other means of communication, has a powerful advantage when it comes to dealing with large corporations.


Case Study No. 1: Time Warner Cable

Everyone I have ever met who has interacted Time Warner Cable hates it.  They have something of a monopoly on the cable and ISP sector here in NYC (at least until some other networks finish building their infrastructure).  They're expensive, notoriously slow in scheduling appointments or doing basically anything, and the only way to get anything done is to call them.  Calling them, of course, requires more patience and perseverance than the average person can comprehend, since the folks answering the calls are generally not empowered to do anything beyond the most basic functions.

Last week, I called Time Warner Cable to schedule an appointment for them to pick up our cable box and modem and cancel the account on our current apartment.  I would take any appointment at all, I told them, so long as it was on or before the 30th of May.  They told me the next available appointment was June 8th.  I explained that I would not be living in this city on that day, and that since the "appointment" consists of them driving by, picking up the box, and leaving, I was sure they could squeeze in something.  This is a dense city, the Time Warner trucks are in the neighborhood every day.  Surely, surely they could make a two-minute stop along the way sometime in the next ten days.  No, they said, no room for appointments.  I'll spare you the details, largely because they involve me yelling, but after talking to several people and three managers, I finally reached the head of the call center in Wisconsin.  She finally explained to me that she did not have the authority to over-ride the computer scheduling program.  And she did not have the phone number of anyone who did.  And she was the boss of her office, so there was no one she could escalate me to.  Oh, she could call the Brooklyn or Manhattan offices, but even those calls would be diverted to her call center, and she'd only get one of her employees on the line.  Bottom line: There was nothing she could do.  And this was after being on the phone for nearly two hours.

Frustrated, angry, and defeated, I finally agreed to drag the box to their office myself and drop it off some day in the future, the only option I was left with.  After hanging up the phone, I vented on Twitter.  "@TWCable_NYC won't pick up our equipment, and they'll charge us until we take it to them. Customer service fail. @TWCableHelp"  Almost immediately, Bryan, one of the many folks behind the @TWCableHelp account tweeted back.  Over a few quick back-and-forth tweets, I explained my frustration, and he offered to help.  I sent him my contact info via a private tweet (called a "direct message" or DM for those of you not yet Twittified).  About an hour later, a woman from Time Warner called me.  Let me say that again: Time Warner called me.  She verified my information, and made me an appointment before we move out.  Just like that.


Case Study No. 2: Bank of America

All the drama going on with our mortgage bank approving, not approving, and hopefully someday re-approving the building in which we're buying an apartment has been another major source of stress lately.  As the messenger of the bad news, the mortgage broker I've been working with has gotten the brunt of my concerns as we've edged closer and closer to moving day without knowing where we're moving to.  He's been great, and trying very hard to keep me informed, but in the end, the decisions have been in the bank's hands.  The bank he's working with is Bank of America.  Frustrated, I again tweeted at an account of theirs that I found, @BofA_Help, more than anything as a vent for how distressing it is to be moving in five days with no clear destination.

Again, within minutes, Sharon from Bank of America tweeted back asking for my phone number.  She promised to call me herself the next day.  And she did.  Bank of America called me.  She listened to my story, took my information, and said she would do everything she could.  She called my mortgage broker directly to talk to him (he was surprised as well).  She then called the head of the condo mortgage department and talked to her directly.  She gathered all the information she could, and called me back a couple hours later to tell me everything she'd learned.

Unfortunately, there really was nothing she could do to help.  The head of the condo department explained to her the delays in approving the building, and there really is no way to make them go away.  But while Sharon couldn't solve my problem, she made me feel much better.  Suddenly, I wasn't a number on a spreadsheet.  I was a person whose concerns were brought directly to the department head.  Think about large corporations, especially customer-facing corporations, and think about how amazing that previous sentence is.

Conclusions

You can make the argument that these teams of folks dedicated to responding to tweets are a good PR move for the companies, and you'd be right.  Negative comments on Twitter are public, on view to everyone, and if the person tweeting is well-connected, can spread like wild fire.  Responding quickly to them generally elicits positive reaction tweets immediately thereafter.  Looks great for the company, big win.

But the customers win, too.  These Twitter teams, unlike any other customer-facing employees, seem to have the connections within the company to get results.  They can over-ride computer scheduling systems.  They can call department heads directly.  And they can do this within minutes to hours.  There's a psychological element as well.  The customer feels like a person, because a person responds to them.  But there's one thing above all else that is the biggest win for the customers:

With only 140 characters, there's no room for any bull.

Apartment Drama, or, Exile to the Suburbs

At this point, I'm calling it: We will not be moving into our new apartment this weekend.

For those keeping track, we found our new home back in January and signed the contract on it the first week of February.  (For those not keeping track, here's all news I remembered to print.)  There were some early complications in the way the condo was set up with commercial space on the ground floor, but those have long since been worked out.  Back in March, we had our first walk-through, and we were glad to see that it was largely ready for us to move in, with only cosmetic things making our punch list.

In April, we waited.  Waited for bank to give us our loan approval.  When that came, we were truly excited.  Everything was falling into place, and we were set.  Now all we needed was for the bank to make some final approvals on the building itself after those earlier complications.  But all signs pointed to closing in April, or perhaps early May at worst.

Toward the end of April, we heard the building had been approved by the bank.  Our lawyer scheduled a closing date for May 11th.  We were warned that the bank might not have all their ducks in a row by then, but that there was every indication to believe it was possible.  With certainty, we were told, the process was so close to being finished that there was no way the closing would be delayed beyond May.

So it was a time for celebration.  We threw a party in early May to say farewell to our backyard garden (and celebrate a birthday).  We told our landlord that the end of May was when we'd move out of the apartment, giving us time to paint the new place.  Wheels were turning, and we came to realize that Memorial Day weekend, if not earlier, would be when we moved.

Then, suddenly, the bank withdrew its approval of the building.  They'd approved it on a false premise, we were told, they didn't understand some key elements of the way the commercial space was set up.  Huh?  At least one part of the complication came from the fact that the condo uses one address, while the commercial space uses a different address.  Paperwork got confused, the bank got confused, and pulled their approval.  Whether or not we would close in May was once again under question.

Still, we were told not to worry.  The bank would sort out its confusion and re-approve the building any day now.  Any day now.  We asked our mortgage brokers for daily updates, but the answer remained "we're just waiting for the bank's approval."  We tried to be hopeful, as the weeks wore on, but in the back of our minds we were beginning to realize we needed a back-up plan.  And fast.

Which brings us up to this week.  Just yesterday, our lawyer called me again with a tentative closing date on Thursday.  That cuts is close, but still allows us time to move to our new apartment this weekend, since we can't stay in our current apartment beyond the 31st.  Relieved, I shot an email over to the mortgage broker again asking if he thought this was a possibility as well.  He does not think so.  In fact, he's confident we will not be closing tomorrow or Friday.  But he assures us, he's working as hard as he can to get it through as soon as possible.

Time for Plan B.

Lynn's parents have offered to take us in.  They live in Stamford, CT about a forty-five minute train ride from Grand Central.  They have a guest room in their basement with it's own bathroom.  We'd have use of a car, and would be train commuters to work, along with thousands of other suburbanites.  Three and a half years ago, I retreated to Stamford to wait out the job hunt, and now it looks like we'll be returning.  While I'm not looking forward to the commute (at all), I'm grateful for their generosity.  It's won't be convenient, but it will be a way of saving money and spending time with family.  And it's certainly a more viable option than finding a Craigslist short-term lease for a married couple, living out of a hotel, or hopping from couch to couch among friends (although I am also extremely touched and grateful to all of you who offered).

Louis the cat, however, may disagree when he meets Riley the dog.