Queens Reimagined: A Day at CitiField

Today's New York Times included an article extolling the virtues of living in the borough of Queens. The piece walked a line between "successful" new apartment developments, depressingly defined as a $2,000 per month studio, and "bargain" residences that included working fireplaces and enough elbow room to manageably raise a one-child family. In my lifetime, I have lived in two of the neighborhoods the journalist cited: Astoria and Sunnyside. One advantage each area offered residents was its affordability relative to Manhattan's zillionaires playground and the concept known as "Brooklyn".

Florent Morellet,
in front of his eponynous and long-closed restaurant
(Image: blogs.villagevoice.com)

In the same Times issue, a front-page piece talked about Florent Morellet's move to Brooklyn's freshly spawned "it" enclave, Bushwick. The Frenchman used to own a diner in the Meatpacking District that was fun to visit. He finally closed when the neighborhood denizens were fashionistas instead of transvestites and the rent on his establishment escalated beyond any reasonable sum. What became evident in the piece was how selective the notion of "Brooklyn" had become. The former Bushwick of food stamps, gangs, and bad schools was rapidly transforming into a hipster heaven, with wine bars, tablet-armed graduate students, and art walks. Morellet insightfully called this classist dreamscape New York's "East Bank," and he's right about that. (He's not always on the money: Morellet's reverie about the Cypress Hills neighborhood, one of the city's deepest, dreariest Siberian outposts, as resembling San Francisco has to be read to be believed.) Alas, there remains plenty of the Brooklyn the Times routinely ignores, especially the residents chained to foreclosure anxieties, underreported crime, and substandard services.

CitiField, home of the NY Mets baseball team
(Image: nycgovparks.org)

Queens rarely resembles Brooklyn, as I observed earlier this week during a business event at the CitiField baseball stadium. The conference focused on public school librarians' professional development; I attended as a book company sales representative promoting my firm's products. The gathering took place in a large dining/banquet room that included floor to ceiling windows overlooking my former home borough and, in the distance, midtown Manhattan. While the three-hundred-strong librarians listened to a prolonged James Patterson address, my attention drifted to CitiField itself and to the view beyond the ballpark.

Joan Payson Whitney with Casey Stengel (left)
Opening Day, Shea Stadium 1962
(image: artnet.com
original photo: Louis Requena)

This was my first visit to CitiField, and my first to a baseball stadium of any kind this year. (I usually make it a point to see one major league game in person during the season. This year was an exception.) The event's participants walked through the Seaver VIP entrance, named after a New York Mets' pitcher whose best years were nearly a half-century ago. (I can legitimately brag about how I saw Tom Seaver pitch a nearly perfect game in the searing heat of a pennant race against the Chicago Cubs in 1969.) The area featured other nostalgic reminders of a franchise leveraging its past to burnish its Madoff-tarnished present. One of my relatives was general manager of the Mets during their 1969 World Series championship season. (Yes, I did get free tickets and passes to the luxury dining area.) It was a different era, when a Whitney could own a baseball team because it was a sporting thing to do, like owning a race horse. Joan Whitney Payson took more than a sporting interest on which players stayed, played, or sat. Well, it was her team. She also brought Willie Mays back to New York, something my mother, who was raised in a baseball household, deeply appreciated.


Of course, those days are long gone. Looking out toward Flushing Bay, I could see a hint of the World's Fair Marina. It's not exactly anyone's dream getaway, with its proximity to LaGuardia Airport runways, scuzzy water, and a cheerless parkscape bounded by expressways and service roads. Yet, I knew a billiionaire (when there were precious few in the world at the time) who kept his yacht there. My first wife prepared meals for the money man, his wife, and their guests, onboard during the warm weather months. Sometimes, I got to sail on the vessel. Yes, it was nice. Those days are long gone, too.

Main Street, Flushing
(Image: nytimes.com)

A glance to the south showed the outline of the apartment tower where my teen years were spent; to the east, a Flushing where Caucasians enjoy Chinese food and Asians enjoy living. I considered dining there after the library event with my colleague, who had briefly lived in China. However, the grim reality of Queens' late-afternoon traffic created a sense of urgency to get out while we could.

I drove straight home, and wondered how the world had changed to the extent that public school librarians held a meeting at a baseball stadium during the World Series.

My Easter Sundays in Greece and New York

My warmest and most significant adult Easter memories are associated with Greece.

Once upon a time, I lived in Italy. Eager for an Easter vacation, I decided to visit Greece. I really didn't realize what I was getting into. For starters, the entire Greek nation takes the religious aspects of Easter very seriously. That meant heavy travel flows within the country, shops closing on religiously significant days, and an emphasis on family-oriented celebrations. Those realities complicated matters for us. However, they also invaluably opened my eyes to a celebration central to Greek life, regardless of region or municipality. The image from Greek Easter (above) gives a sense of the event's flavor.

On a very chilly Easter Sunday, I met an American-English couple I knew from Rome. They had just arrived in Greece after something of an odyssey from Italy, including experiencing an earthquake in Venice and nearly inadvertently driving into a hostile, very closed Albania. We somehow found some lamb and went to a beach on the Ionian Sea to have a barbecue. As we didn't have any barbecue equipment, we had to improvise. The fire was the easy part. The spit was a challenge, but the Yankee part of the Anglo-American couple solved this by using the metal handle of a pail.

Years later, I lived in a Greek neighborhood in New York. Every Greek Easter, my neighbors formed a proper pit and barbecued a whole lamb over the fire. The marvelous aroma made me very jealous for what they were preparing, but what I could not have. (The Tantalus myth came to mind.) I felt like a stranger in their midst, fascinated by and vaguely understanding what all the fuss was about, but unconnected to their culture's assumptions and needs. I also saw some of the religious observances in one of the local Greek Orthodox churches. I liked those events, as the evident community sense of ritual, celebration, and institutional relevance was unmistakable. This part I understood, except for the Greek Orthodox faith's explicit sense of nationalism.

The Greek religious angle touched me, and still does. I grew up in a small central New York town where religious affiliation mattered. The town was divided along de facto religious lines, and then (and only then) along ethnic lines. Everyone knew the unspoken, but well known deal. I was in the Irish Catholic world, and we had our own church. I was a pretty religious kid, and I loved Easter week. I sang in the choir and truly enjoyed singing the hymns associated with the holiday. The colorful pageantry, the wonderful flowers, the variation between solemnity and celebration, were right up my alley. Many years later, when I saw the Greek services in Athens, I felt touched by the congregation's obvious devotion and belief. It just seemed ironic to witness it in the birthplace of Western philosophy.

Chives, Gardening, and the Lion in Spring

A harbinger of spring for me is seeing the first chive shoots emerge from their dedicated lion's head container.

I'm sentimental about the plants. I've grown them for over two decades, with the exception of one season. They represent an interest in uncomplicated container gardening which began when I lived in New York City's Astoria neighborhood. At that time, Astoria was a largely Greek area where the residents typically grew vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, and flowers in as many areas as their postage stamp-sized yards would permit. It was astonishing, and revealing, what they were able to do with very limited means. I saw my first apricot tree, with its beautiful, delicate blossoms, about a block from my apartment. A neighbor grew a lemon tree under glass. Other homeowners maintained fig trees. My next-door neighbor had a grape arbor for which I lusted, but, like Tantalus, could never possess. They also had a wonderfully lush garden, whose yield was boosted by the home's previous owner's habit of fertilizing it with fresh blood from his slaughterhouse workplace.

This atmosphere inspired me to purchase plants, soil, pots, and manure. My second-floor apartment, part of a two-family home, included a terrace overlooking a shaded backyard. I was very proud of myself with that season's plantings of herbs and flowers. In subsequent years, I've continued this small scale, low maintenance gardening approach. I've always enjoyed it; the one year I was unable to garden was very difficult to endure.

In recent years, I've preferred using seeds as the means to garden. It's a little bit more challenging to do, but the sense of satisfaction is far greater than with "ready-made" plants.

Also, because I'm an apartment dweller, I've been largely compelled to use containers. My favorite is a terra cotta lion's head that I've had since I lived in Astoria. It was my container of choice for chervil and, later, chives. Some years ago, a harsh winter caused the head to break into pieces. I decided to treat it like one would a ruin from antiquity. I kept the pieces in a larger container, partly immersed them in soil, and continued to grow chives. Their emergence every spring gives me of a leonine sense of pride and self-reliance that I value.

Steinway Mansion For Sale

The New York Times reported in today's edition that the Steinway mansion, once home to the piano manufacturing Steinways, is for sale.

The structure and its adjoining property is in Astoria, the Queens neighborhood where I lived for a grand total of six years. My residence was within relatively easy walking distance of the Steinway grounds. It was also a world away. The Steinway mansion was lost in time. Originally built as a weekend getaway on a desirable shoreline, the area surrounding the Steinway property morphed into a collection of low-rise industrial buildings, a decidedly uncharming water treatment plant, Archie Bunker-style houses, a bleak river view, and nearby airports. That left the mansion marooned in an eerie sort of isolation. And it wasn't as if one could break through the time warp by the radical notion of walking up to the mansion itself and knock on the door. Michael Halberian, who had purchased the house from the Steinways well over a generation ago, was rather selective about whom he permitted into the mansion.

There's much more to the Steinway mansion story than what appeared in the occasionally too-cutely written Times piece. I'm hopeful one writer in particular, who lived in Astoria when I did, will have something to contribute. She has the capacity to bring depth, nuance, and style to this chapter of the Steinway mansion's saga.

Independence Day in Rome and New York

When I lived in Rome, America's Independence Day was just another day in the Eternal City. Yet, thousands of miles from anything resembling the United States, I had an irrepressible urge to have a picnic, eat American-style food, and drink ice tea or beer. (Ice tea is a decidedly un-Italian beverage.) I got together with a few friends who shared a similar feeling, found someplace to eat outdoors, and had a makeshift celebration.

Most other Independence Day gatherings haven't stayed with me as the Roman one has. The New York holidays are mostly memorable for fireworks displays. When I lived in Astoria, at that time a largely Greek community, the 4th of July was living hell for my cats. The fireworks hurt the animals' sensitive hearing and the noise frightened them. I could not help or console them. I wanted the neighbors' gunpowder orgy over with as quickly as possible.

One brighter holiday memory was watching fireworks over New York Harbor. I was invited to a rooftop July 4th party along Brooklyn's Red Hook waterfront. At that time, Red Hook was a somewhat menacing slum where one could feel desperately anxious on its dimly lit streets. The rooftop was like any other New York tenement rooftop on a hot summer night, except that it commanded a sensational view of Lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the harbor. And so, while enjoying Mexican food and beer, I watched a celebration of our nation's independence with a mixed crowd of American citizens and undocumented aliens.