Day 362…
The northern end of Manhattan is far less tame than its southern part.
Starting uptown at about where we are, the mostly flat landscape starts to roll so that by the time you get to the top of the island, you’ve had to climb some actual hills.
Large outcroppings of glacial rock separate some streets from others, enough so that if you’ve chosen to walk in one direction instead of another, you are out of luck if you change your mind. You either have to keep going north and hope that eventually you will be able to walk around it or you have to retrace your steps downtown for a few blocks and start up again on the other side.
The original Dutch city of New Amsterdam was founded on the southern tip of the island. The city sprang up there and slowly crept uptown as more and more people arrived. Surrounded on three sides by water, the only direction that new people could settle in was to the north. As waves of people arrived the settlement started to fill up the rest of the available acreage like water being poured into a glass. The rising tide flattened the land and sent rivers and streams underground to get them out of the way of everything that was being constructed.
The oldest photograph known to have been taken in Manhattan dates from 1848. It shows a small, comfortable-looking farmhouse perched on top of a hill encircled by a white picket fence. Between that enclosure and the camera is a fairly deep gully that must have had a stream rushing through it.
This house was somewhere along what was then called Bloomingdale Road and is today called Broadway. Bloomingdale Road was the main thoroughfare from the city below up to the farmland and the northern tip of the island which, of course was as far as you could go at that point in time. There were no bridges to take you further north into the Bronx. Instead, there were just extremely steep cliffs falling into the Hudson that stopped you in your tracks. The highlands stayed cool in the summer, so it was a popular place to take a day trip to, to escape the city’s heat and noise.
Somewhere around 100th Street was a small village, also called Bloomingdale, and then a couple of miles to the north of that was Washington Heights.
In 1848, when the photograph was taken, downtown did not look all that dissimilar from how it looks today. Another photograph taken in 1850 at a point near Broadway and Franklin Streets shows multi-storied tenements that may actually still be standing down there today. It is recognizable to our contemporary eyes as lower Manhattan.
Nothing in that 1848 shot of the farmhouse looks like anything you would see, today, in the city.
Above 190th Street, lies Fort Tryon Park. In the middle of it stands the MET Cloisters Museum. Built around sections of four different actual medieval French cloisters, the museum houses much of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collections from that time period. The buildings, themselves, sit atop a fairly steep hill that commands a breathtaking view of the Hudson River and New Jersey beyond.
The cloister buildings were purchased by American sculptor George Grey Barnard. He purchased them as ruins in France and had them transported to New York and subsequently reconstructed. John D. Rockefeller then bought them from him for the museum. He also bought the land along the Palisades Cliffs across the river in New Jersey and donated it to the State so as to preserve the view.
Maybe the best known of the artworks housed there are the series of the Flemish, Hunt of the Unicorn, tapestries.
I hadn’t been there recently, so yesterday, I took the train up and then, after exploring the museum for a while, walked back home.
Strolling through the ancient stone buildings is as close to being in Europe as we here in the states can be these days. Around each corner, it seems, is another columned courtyard, each with its own garden. It’s as far away from New York City as you can go and still be on the same island.
When the buildings were acquired, people were already starting to use their stones for other things. Barnard claimed that one of the tomb effigies that he bought was being used, face down, as a bridge across a stream. I have no doubt whatsoever that there is likely much more to the story and none of it probably reflects at all well on anybody involved in its creation but having the Cloisters here is a remarkable gift. For an hour or two, I felt as if I were somewhere else.
Last night was the big interview between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Oprah Winfrey. Everybody seems to be weighing in with an opinion about it. Honestly, I just don’t care all that much one way or another. I haven’t watched it. I am too conscious of both sides trying to manipulate how I feel.
It all just comes down to money and power. There’s the big bad corporation of the monarchy as a whole and then the poor innocent suffering Sussexes. The Firm is trying to color our opinion of the Sussexes and the Sussexes are trying to color our opinion of the Firm. There’s a lot of money at stake.
The British Monarchy function as kind of cultural ambassadors for Great Britain. They head charities and make appearances as a way of drumming up interest in the country for the purpose of attracting tourists. And their money.
The Royal’s leadership is mostly nostalgic, but they help create an illusion of solidarity and endurance in a country that, because of Brexit and the pandemic, is rather lacking in both at the moment.
Symbols are important. Clearly the British royals serve a function in English society, however figurative. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be in the position that they are.
MSNBC did a piece yesterday with an American journalist and a British tabloid journalist. The point of the interview was to highlight the role that the tabloids have had in the decision that the Duke and Duchess made to leave.
Taken as a whole, the viciousness of the attacks against the Duchess is truly horrific. Seeing the steady stream of hateful innuendo and thinly veiled racism coming her way, is it any wonder why they felt they had to leave.
The television series The Crown is a beautifully made exploration into the actual people who constitute the monarchy. The show explores them as real people thrust into unreal circumstances which is what makes it so revelatory. These are fictional versions, of course, because the writers are not personally privy to who these people really are. The writers have tried to create portraits of who they believe them to be from the clues that we have all received from their actions as reported in the press.
The Woody Allen and Mia Farrow fight is also happening in in the press, albeit almost purely from Mia Farrow’s point of view. Woody Allen is not fighting back and in the court of public opinion, she is winning. He is suffering as a result.
Not even the children in the family can agree on what really happened. That the people in the fight fighting the hardest are the ones that stand to gain the most financially is not a coincidence.
However questionably the relationship started, Soon-Yi is now 50 years old. She and Woody have been married for 23 years. It is the longest of his relationships by far. Whatever actually transpired, and it is really none of any of our businesses, the documentary is designed to solidify public opinion in one specific direction. I don’t need to watch that either.
We use stories to work through our own conflicts. Fairy tales allow us to objectify our fears and put a name and a shape to them, no matter how improbable. If Jack can slay his giant, then maybe that shows us that we can slay ours.
Watching real people’s stories unfold in the press is no different. They aren’t about them - they are about us.
We think we know these people, but we don’t. What we know of them has been shown to us in carefully curated bites. Small events get magnified and large events get minimized and none of us are the wiser for it.
These stories about the rich and powerful that the press is feeding us are just crafted adult fairy tales. The Press makes them seem important so that we watch them, and their ratings go up and, of course, they get more money.
I’m watching this morning as everybody weighs in on Meghan and Harry. People are truly invested. There are some full-fledged online arguments going on. For all they know about what REALLY is going on, though, these arguments could all be about an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
The Governor of New York is holding firm that he is not going to resign. His opponents, even from within his own party, are going to add chapter upon chapter to the story that supports him leaving.
What will we be left with when all of that is over and he is finally gone? We will be left without a strong leader, who yes is a flawed human being, possibly extremely flawed, just when we need a strong leader the most.
We are going to revel in this particular story, watch it unfold and get worse and worse, which I have no doubt that it will, and at the end, where will we be? He’ll be gone, we will have no leader, and the Press will move on to the next salacious tale. Meanwhile, the Press will have gotten the ratings that they were hungry for and everybody who is trying to amass their own power will have greedily gathered some attention and all of us will have just watched.
When it’s all over, and the villains, real or created, have been vanquished, we will then just turn to another channel and start watching the next one.
One of the pieces in the Cloister’s collection is a carved ivory cross called either the Cloister’s Cross or the Bury St. Edmond’s Cross. It is about 2 foot tall and beautifully made. Walking through the treasury section it has a position of relative prominence but aside from a basic description there is little to differentiate it from the other treasures surrounding it.
In 1981, Thomas Hoving, who was an Associate Curator of the museum at the time that they acquired the cross, published a book called King of the Confessors. The book is all about the cross and its creation, it’s imagery and, most of all, the adventure that Hoving went through in the process of buying it.
It would make a spectacular movie. The book, which, of course, has its detractors, goes into depth about how museums work - how they raise money, how they compete with each other - all of the nasty little things that happen behind closed doors.
The cross, itself, is not all that it seems on first viewing, either. While nobody knows who made it, there is a lot about it that suggests that there are decidedly anti-Semitic aspects to the imagery. It is thought that the piece was made somewhere during the 12th Century in England. The tide of public opinion was rising against the Jewish people to the point that by the end of the following century they were all expelled from Britain. The cross may have been made to help that along.
Most of the population in those years was illiterate so the press of the day was verbal. And visual. In this case, the storyteller seems to have been trying to tell a tale that would help sway the population to their way of thinking.
To a casual observer, the Bury St. Edmond’s cross is a beautiful object, but it likely wouldn’t be the piece of art that that person would remember the most after they left. I read Thomas Hoving’s book when I was still in High School so for, me, that carved cross is the most vivid thing in the entire place. Yes, much of what I know of it came from one person who certainly told his story to benefit himself in some way. Regardless, his story adds remarkable dimension to what would, ordinarily, just be two or three dry lines of description on a card posted next to it.
The television gets turned off earlier and earlier in our apartment these days.
The city, itself, has so many stories to tell, that it seems a far better use of my time to go out and track some of those down. People come and go, but the city, at least during this current epoch, endures. It was here before us and, god willing, will be here long afterwards.
I would much rather listen to its stories than the ones that are being served up on television these days. The city has nothing to gain and nothing to lose in the telling. They’re just stories.
And I am always hungry for a good story.
❤️You’re always hungry for a good story! love that one....and every day you offer a buffet of stories you tell ...tales of our extraordinary city and of others... me too / I agree more invested in those around me...the media stories leave me....starving after been fed junk food.
💞🙏