Poe, alone--

Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem below at the age of twenty, upon the death of his stepmother who raised him, on the very verge of his move to New York City. Poe was a haunted man, and the deep wellsprings of his passions were tightly wound around a moroseness and longing he harnessed with the exactitude of his verse. See how he breaks up the lines here, tearing apart his own meter he had perfectly established. The effect is as isolating as his words, as isolated as his heart. Poe was born in Boston, raised in Richmond, attended UVA and West Point, wrote Israfel, To Helen, and The City in the Sea in NYC, moved to Philadelphia, and wound up wandering a street in Baltimore where he was hospitalized then died, all and by the age of forty. But not before inventing the detective novel, some precursors to science fiction, and penning some of the most widely-read better-known and hauntingly beautiful American poetry.

Alone.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —
Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still —
From the torrent, or the fountain —
From the red cliff of the mountain —
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold —
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by —
From the thunder, and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view —

Milay.

While many places may claim her, her birthplace in Rockland, Maine, her childhood home in Camden of the same state, Poughkeepsie where she wowed them at Vassar, even Paris where she made a splash, we, here in New York, sing her praises perhaps the loudest, the city where she wandered Greenwich Village at the height of its Bohemia, and produced some of the loveliest poetry and in particular the most splendid sonnets in the English language, certainly the American canon. I love Edna St. Vincent Millay for her complicated heart. Hers was raw and fierce and brutally honest. As wonderful as life was, it was a painful affair to be sure, and as full as life was, it was unfair that it be snatched from even anyone in death. She lived by Thomas' words, raging against the dying of the light. In the poem below, she turns beauty on its head and I understand the terror of a brightness so brilliant that it blinds, the darkness in the light, an unrequited, thwarted love, the foul fairness, the poisonous libations that both beckon and maim:

When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause; and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.

The old Hotel Astor.

As I look out my living room window eastward, down the block is the somewhat uninspired Minskoff Building, a tower recognizable for its fins at the top. But until as late as 1967, that view would have been of the second-empire Beaux-arts bubble of a building called the Hotel Astor, built in 1904, with its copper mansard roof dotted with rows of ox-eye windows, elaborately-themed ballrooms, rooftop gardens, and exotic restaurants, it brought elegance to the backwater that was once Longacre Square before it was Times Square, and built right out to the street side lending a bit of claustrophobia to the later years of its life in the growing neighborhood, in the neighborhood that fell down under its watch, and so, it had to go. It did have to go. It had nothing to do with what Times Square is today. That's ok. But it's fun to remember.

The old Waldorf Astoria.

Designed by Henry Hardenbergh who gave us The Plaza and The Dakota, the Waldorf Astoria sat on 34th Street and 5th Avenue. It was a fantasy of a building, like a chateau in the Loire Valey, like a castle on a hill in Bavaria, like a Russian Orthodox temple in Odessa. Hardenbergh used elements of Beaux-arts ornamentation, Ottoman onion domes, and gothic length to give us this eye candy that was obsolete in thirty-six years. Astounding. The wealth moved uptown, leaving the Waldorf Astoria in the dust, the same dust that would give rise to the Empire State Building that sits on the site today.

The old Grand Central.

The predecessor to Grand Central Terminal, this was a building reminiscent of The Louvre for its enormous mansard roofs, it's heavily articulated rusticated cornices, the ornate clock faces, and the delicate grille-work. Designed by John Snook whose cast-iron warehouses, department stores, and office building still dot SoHo, this building remarkably, stood only for thirty-two years.

The old Met.

Critics called The old Met "The Yellow Brick Brewery" for its industrial look sitting where it did at Broadway and the whole block between 39th and 40th Sts. in the middle of the Garment District. Opened in 1883 with a production of FAUST, it was gutted by fire just a few years later in 1892 and the interior rebuilt under the artful eye of architects Carrere and Hastings. This is The Met most people remember, with it's golden proscenium inscribed with the names of six composers, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Gounod, and Verdi. New Yorkers regularly saw enormous set pieces on the street at the back of the theatre. It was clearly not big enough to be a world-class modern opera house. After several proposals to move The Met to Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle, The new Met opened at Lincoln Center in 1966 and The old Met was razed the following year.

The Manahatta Project.

The Manahatta Project

The Manahatta Project (currently under expansion as the Welekia Project) was launched in 2009 in conjunction with the 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson's historic sail up the river that now bears his name in the rather diminutive but hearty sailing vessel known as the Half Moon.

The Project sought to "re-discover" the Island of Manhattan as Hudson might have encountered it that very first time, a lush verdant hilly landscape, dappled with brooks and ponds, inlets and beaches, cliffs and valleys, and the infamous swamp lands in the middle of the island we now know as Central Park. Anthropological studies were painstakingly researched to determine the vegetation and wildlife of four centuries ago, and after years of data collection, scientific speculation and historical cross-referencing, a map emerged: A map of Manahatta, the Island of Many Hills, the land of the Leni Lenape and Algonquin tribes, part of the Iroquois Nation.

Open the map (it requires Flash Player) and see Manhattan of 2009, the grid of streets and avenues where space seems impossible to find, where buildings abut one another in friendly chaos, where parks are beautiful but designed by the hands of men and carved out of nature, where the bottom half of the island is distinctly "fatter" than it had been after years of nonchalant landfill, broken piers, trash, grounded ships, and, more recently, well thought-out projects like Battery Park City, 90-acres of land added to the southwest corner of Manhattan after the original excavation of the first World Trade Center in 1968.

And underneath this present vision, see the Manahatta of 1609: A very different place, a place where millions upon millions of personal triumphs and tragedies would eventually play out among the diminishing trees and rearranged streams. But this project is not meant to make us weep for the past, but to rearrange our vision of Manhattan in the dawn of a new century.

We are thoroughly committed to our green spaces, and are, for example, in the very midst of a one-million-tree-planting project. We hope to add green spaces to the roofs of almost every building in Manhattan, and as we add bike lanes and widen esplanades, with fewer people in automobiles, we fully expect our city to look much more green again. A canopy of green under which will lie the city that we all love. The best of both maps.

I found this site fascinating and I hope you will as well, with all my best wishes.

Subway connections.

Sometimes, when you take the subway, in the middle of a mass of humanity, you can oddly feel a little lonely, particularly on a day when you've dropped off fifty new friends at the airport and they are no longer following behind you except in the pretty pictures in your mind's eye and the lovely song you can still hear in your mind's ear.

Most people on the NYC subway have found a way to disconnect form the throng, to look inward and take a little break from visual and aural invasion of the madding crowd. The good people at Apple have brought us the iSubway, where everyone is connected to their favorite music or tricky games or, if you're above ground in Queens, your gossip-y friend. But I dispensed with all of that and my crossword puzzles last year to look people in the eyes.

To connect.

And it works! Look across the aisle and smile and more often than not, someone will smile back. It is amazing to be reminded that we are human and people respond in kind. Toddlers are the best. Every one in the world is a potential new best friend to them, and although the consistency of the universe is a little beyond their comprehension and you will disappear from their memories the moment they leave the train, they will make any number of faces at you as long as you make faces back.

We should never forget our toddler heart.

One day, on the A train, a group of very rowdy youths got on board at 14th Street. They were pushing one another, their soft drinks flying, laughing and loud. Very, very loud. Then one of them, unusually tall and thin, touched the overhead bar, rose up en pointe, and effortlessly raised his other leg into an arabesque. The poetry of his movement, this moment, moved me to my core. A random act of artistry, and I was so happy to live in New York, on a subway, like today, where beauty can break out like springtime.

My shining friends.

Should I ever become weary of my world, should I forget that a special brand of magic awaits me each morning on these streets at my feet, should I fail to look up at this shining night the way they'll tell you not to in NYC, I'll remember you, my new friends, from Arkansas, from Texas. When I see my city through your wonder-filled wonderful eyes, I'm reminded how much my home means to me, and that it is truly only made special by the people, people like you, indeed, specifically you, who teach me more than I could ever teach you.

To Clarksville, a special thank you for your music all week. I must admit to being head-over-heels in love with talent. So, you've won my heart. I am a shadow in your starlight. In return, a song for all of you. Come back and sing it to me one day:

Splendor in the grass.

Out of a Tim Burton film, the parabola of a lawn on the Lincoln Center campus is getting ready for another season of thousands of visitors who will climb its curvy verdant sweep to escape the city by one story and take in the sunshine surrounded by the Travertine of Tuscany. Designed by Elizabeth Diller, of the architecture firm, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the lawn is part of a series of largely subtle changes, pleasing updates, all-around user-friendliness to what had sometimes been described as a bleak, stark urban project. Lincoln Center has a little more life now, a lot more light, and the craziest patch of green that catches your eye and lures you up into its lush life to frolic on a mat of nature in the air. See you up there!

Junior's Restaurant: Ah, the cheesecake!

Since Jill asked...

There has been a diner on the corner of DeKalb and Flatbush in Brooklyn since 1929. In 1950, owner, Harry Rosen, founded his new restaurant and named it for his sons, Walter and Marvin. Junior's was born. Although a little bit of everything was on the menu, it was the cheesecake that grabbed everyone's gustatory attention. The recipe had been in the Rosen Family for three generations and it well deserves it's nickname, "The World's Most Fabulous Cheesecake."

A fire nearly destroyed Junior's in 1981, and distraught Brooklynites gathered at the catastrophe screaming, "Save the cheesecake! Save the cheesecake!" They couldn't, sadly. But they saved the recipe, and today, Junior's Cheesecake can still be bought at the original location, in Grand Central Terminal, off Times Square, and in the lobby of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

And, you can buy it right here, on-line (their new Carrot Cheesecake is Jeff's favorite):

http://www.juniorscheesecake.com/juniors_cheesecake/Juniors_Cheesecake_Home/Our_Collections.php