mapquest

Last Friday I went on an impromptu bus tour of Manhattan and the Bronx. I had organized a picnic for the tenants at the building where I work, thinking we would take a lovely Friday afternoon trip to Van Cortlandt Park. When we left, the sky was overcast and drizzly, so we told the bus driver to "take the scenic route," hoping that by the time we got to the Bronx the sun would be out and we'd have a lovely day. Well, when we got up to 242nd St., there was thunder and a downpour, so no picnic. But we came back again into Manhattan, taking the scenic route all the way down Broadway.

The experience was amazing. I always love riding through New York City in a motor vehicle. Somehow one's experience of the city changes; it is slowed down and put into a frame. It's an experience somewhat akin to Brecht's verfremdungseffekt ("making strange"), whereby that which is familiar is recontextualized and thus made strange or "new." As we rode across town, neighborhoods that I knew well started to blend into ones that I didn't. We rode along E. 23rd St., down which I used to walk every day when I went to work but haven't set foot on in months. No sooner did we turn uptown but we were in Murray Hill and then the Upper East Side, neighborhoods so unfamiliar to me that they might have been foreign countries. Why are there so many Japanese restaurants around here, I asked myself?

On the way back I dozed off a bit; when I awoke I felt a curious sense of impending familiarity. I looked around at buildings that I had never seen before but somehow I had a sense that we were about the enter a nieghborhood I knew. Then it clicked: we were back in Manhattan and about to pass by Columbia. No sooner had I realized this than the campus appeared on my left and I saw the gate that I've been passing through a few times a week for the past 6 months, to visit S in his Columbia dorm (but no more, he's in the real world now).

It's amazing how the areas that you know in a city, especially this city, sneak up on you like that. Amazing how the parts of town that you feel you have "claimed" interlock with parts that you have no interest in or no command of. Drop me off in some parts of midtwon (9th Ave. in Hell's kitchen, say) and I can tell you where to find a decent Thai restaurant, but drop me off a few blocks northeast and I would be in terra incognita.

Riding in the bus I started to think of new ways to map the city. I think the visual image of the five boroughs that most New Yorkers carry in their heads is this one, drawn up and conveniently scaled by the MTA. The map is deceptive: Manhattan takes centerstage; Brooklyn is drastically smaller, a suburban satellite instead of the vast metropolis you see on a correctly scaled map. Interesting, too, are the wastelands, the undocumented regions that are left blank or "blanker" because no subway lines run there. Someone is always talking about the "proposed Second Avenue subway line" that will open up the East Side, but there are also vast areas of Brooklyn, located between and beyond the branching veins of the subway lines that are quite literally unrepresented. Look at the map: what's out beyond the end of the 2 train?

I actually took the 2 to the end last weekend to go to my co-worker's birthday party in Flatbush. People out there in Brooklyn drive cars when they wanna get into the city. That seems so foreign to me.

For one reason or another, I've actually visited the terminuses (termini?) or quite a few train lines recently. I rode the L all the way out to Canarsie in April to pick up a wayward UPS package and discovered a hinterland of warehouses and liminal spaces, in which somnambulant voyagers from all across Brooklyn stood in line waiting to claim the items that had been mailed to them. In the past week, I rode the 4 train to it's end (origin?) in the Bronx in order to visit DeWitt Clinton High School, where I was recruiting students for the theater program I teach in; I rode past Yankee Stadium (a first for me) and emerged at the end of the line into a world of pastoral beauty on a lovely spring day, the high school building nestled into the "emerald necklace" of Mosholu Parkway and Van Cortlandt.

(Taking a train out to its extremity makes you ask whether the stop you arrive at is the beginning or end of the line. All depends on your perspective, I guess, your point of departure. Strange how the "heart" of every subway line -- except the G -- occurs about halfway through its length, when it passes through Manhattan. That is where much of the line's character is defined. Does is pass through Grand Central, Times Square, or Penn Station? And yet, it's possible to ride the train at either end and to experience none of this. How interesting it would be to watch a time lapse photograph or sped-up video and to see how the demographics of subway riders change and morph over the course of a single trip from end to end, how the cars start to fill up with white people in fancy clothes, and then how the process is reversed.)

Thinking of my city in this way makes me feel like an explorer, like Magellan. I think of the days when the "known world" had a finite stopping point, days when cartographers left blank spaces and said things like "here be dragons" (thank you for that one, James Baldwin). The other day, I happened to be in the first car of the C train and you do feel like you're at the prow of a ship, thundering into the darkness. (I stole this image, too, from the opening pages of Don DeLillo's Libra, in which the young Lee Harvey Oswald rides the subway lines from the Bronx all the way out to Brooklyn.)

What would an alternative map of New York City look like? One that disregarded geography and instead tried to capture familiarity, experience? There are certain blocks that feel as if they belong to you: the obvious ones, of course, ones that you walk down every day on your way from home to work, but also ones that -- for whatever reason -- you just know, ones for which you have instant mental recall of the storefronts that line the street (and you can test yourself on the A9 Yellowpages site, which serves as a sort of photgraphic walking tour of Manhattan block by block, though I've noticed that it doesn't get updated very frequently; a lot of businesses seem to have come and gone...)

Maybe one could start an experiential map of New York City by taking a highlighter to the map we already know. Streets that have been trod and trod again would be overlayed in bright neon yellow, whereas unctouched streets would be left blank. Everyone's map would be different. In my case, certain parts of town would be thoroughly filled in (by now, for example, I can pretty much claim to know the entire swath of Manhattan, between both rivers, from 23rd St. to Houston). In other parts of town, familiar routes would stand out like the Oregon trail, blazed through otherwise untocuhed territory. I walked and re-walked the path from the Lorimer St. stop in Brooklyn to Galapagos on N. 6th, but most of the rest of Williamsburg would be left monochrome.

But what about time? How to document the point of origin of "my New York"? Geography need not contain us in our attempt to show the city that my experience has shaped. The place where New York began, for me, my Tigris and Euphrates, for instance, is 1st Avenue and 9th St. in the East Village, the intersection where you will find P.S. 122 (site of my first New York job). That was the first location I could really call my own and it is from that fertile crescent that all of my subsequent experiences flowed. The temporal map would snake out from that crossroads in different directions, first to Washington Square and MacDougal St., then Union Square and Gramercy Park and now into Brooklyn where it would join with other mighty tributaries, like Fulton St. and Lafayette, Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush. Soon, with my new job, another branch of the experiential river will be flowing up close to Harlem (hello, again, James Baldwin).

I'm not the only one who's been thinking of New York this way. The other day I read the following in an email from one I love:

I've noticed that when you've lived in New York (or any city but for some reason it's more vivid here) for long enough something wonderful starts happening— streets and corners, bars and cafes, subways stops and parks all bring memories of times lived in them. I was thinking, as I kept walking, how in the course of a 2-hour walk there were so many places that reminded me of you either because we’ve walked by them together, been in them, or we'vetalked about them. It was quite moving to realize that this city that I love so much is becoming so tightly intertwined with the memories of the boy that I love the most in this whole world.

I don't know the answer, S. Proust mapped his experiences in the same way: he wasn't just about tastes and smells -- roads, like Swann's way and the Guermantes' way, had deep significance for him. But there's something about New York that makes this even "more vivid," as you say. Could it be that the grid system, which so democratically welcomes newcomers into the city, makes it that much easier for us to learn our way around, to become "experts" at Manhattan? (I spent my whole childhood and young adulthood in Boston and still couldn't tell you if Boylston St. runs one way.) In addition, since the grid lacks "personality" (what really dsitinguishes 16th St. from 17th?), we need to enscribe it with our own memories and associations, our own private signposts, to help keep from getting lost. All of this becomes that much more intense in summertime, I think, because we spend so much more time on the streets and sidewalks, we walk slower and we stop to look at everything around us.

I still haven't drawn my experiential map; if I was better at web programming I suppose I could try to show it to you. Unfortunately, you'll have to settle for someone else's attempt. A website called New York Songlines tries to do just waht we've described, to create a map of the city that digs deeper into the hidden histroy of the place; on the songlines map, what's below the streets is just as important as what's above...

On that site, there's a quote from Colson Whitehead that seems pretty a propos:

No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.... You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Well, I wasn't around for Munsey's, but I am old enough to know that that Duane Reade on Bleecker used to be Kim's Video; I dearly miss the old 19th Hole bar on 2nd Ave. (me and probably only one other person!); I know, of course, where the old Cock used to be; I remember how you used to be able to see the Carl Fischer advertisement, with the musical note onthe side of the building in Astor Place before they built that ugly high-rise. This city may be built of steel and concrete, but it rests on far less tangible foundations.