Brooklyn Flea Market in the Williamsburg Savings Bank

For some time now the Williamsburg Savings Bank has been shuttered for renovation.

I’d heard that the whole building, from the iconic clock tower (biggest in the world apparently) on down to the old bank lobby, was to be turned into condos and living spaces for the rich. I’d look out on that iconic tower, visible from pretty much anywhere in downtown Brooklyn, with some sadness, thinking it would be one more New York space which I’d only have access to from a distance. This summer, I looked over Nathan Kensinger’s photo essay of the still-being-renovated building and wondered if the public would ever have access to these spaces.

But thanks to a Brit in Brooklyn posting the week before, I found it that the newly renovated bank lobby is the winter home of the Brooklyn Flea Market.

And my, what a lobby . . .

I used to bank here, coming in to change money or even use the ATM, just for the chance to gaze up at the exquisite mosaic ceilings, or be served at the old-time metal teller grates. You felt like you’d stepped back in time – and indeed the bank, if not the building, had the feeling of being marooned in time since the Hanson Place of that pre-Atlantic Terminal era had a desolate, edge of the world feeling, a last repository of the near-abandonment which had once engulfed downtown Brooklyn. The destruction of the old Atlantic Station in the late 80’s, I’m sure, played a part, but apparently the bank tower, built in 1929 has been an analomy since its inception in 1929, when it was assumed that many like buildings would go up aside it. Alas, the Great Depression then central Brooklyn’s post-war decline put paid to that.

I’ve read (I can’t find the freakin’ links now) that the hall is marketed as a venue for luxury acts, so I’m a little unclear what its long-term function will be. Apparently, the spaces behind the teller grates are to be reented out for retail, though there are no takers yet. Cultural ‘industries’ like Bomb magazine have rented out office space in the upper floors, and BAM has some kind of presence. Let’s hope this magnificent and historic lobby remains a public venue for years to come.

Creative use of old teller windows

Twilight of the Koffee Klatch

Back when coffee was just coffee

I’ve been sick off and on all freakin’ month so haven’t had the energy to gather material for this freakin’ blog . . .

On better days, to get out of the house, I’ve been making it out to those strange hybirds of our increasingly strange culture, the coffee shop.

I have, however, been in the habit of going in the mornings for some time. I had a bad injury ten or so years ago and during the long, long period of convalescence, it was a relief to go to a public place and scribble in a notebook for half an hour to an hour. ‘Morning writing’. It didn’t have to be serious, or even make sense. The act of writing, forcing my brain to form words and get them on the page at a time when I was often in the worst shape, set the tone for the rest of the day. I had to find the right place. enough people to make it interesting, but with enough space to remove yourself, have the space to write. An aural background to shut out the higher pitched distractions.

Not easy to find. The steady encroachment of the cellphone hasn’t made it easier. Starbucks, oddly enough, often provides the necessary mix . . .

Outside of the mornings, I’ve never really been into the whole cafe thing. Even when I lived in Montreal.  Italian coffee places, great. Cafes in Paris, wonderful. But North America never really got the concept. Even if I’m not drinking, I’d rather go to a bar. I’ve especially never been down with those hip little cafes that  with the funky art on the walls, the hipster barristas, the range of muffins, cupcakes, and  the thousand coffee blends – the places that sweep in just ahead of any serious wave of gentrification.

We got a half-dozen of them in my neighborhood now.

This weekend an article in Canada’s Globe and Mail (‘Where Did Cafe Culture go?,  more or less a rewrite of WSJ’s No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users) talked about the spread of laptops in cafes, how people are increasingly coming in for one coffee, opening their laptops and staying for hours (or even all day) so many owners are pulling the plug on wifi because they can’t make any money. I wrote before about the electronic galley slaves that have taken over many cafes now.

It seems that many cafes have become surrogate offices now. I know a lot of people, in this area at least, who go to cafes in the daytime are freelancers or students, or unemployed. A lot them probably live packed into cramped apartments where it’s easier to work in a cafe, even a crowded one. But you rarely see anyone using pen and paper anymore. In the last few years, I’ve come to feel like some kind of anachronism, writing with a pen, in a notebook.

I could understand all that – hey, times change – but what I really don’t get is people who pull out their cellphones and start yapping haut voix so their voice dominates their entire space (especially when the cafe is practically empty). I really don’t get people who can spend hours gaping into their laptops when they could be outside, walking around. The recession, gentrification – all have played their part in the decline of New York’s famous open-ness – but the spread of these cafes with their electronic hives have done their share as well. I mean hey, I love computers, but this is still, even in winter, one of the most entertaining cities in the Western World. Why would you want to spend hours in some dumb-ass cafe talking checking updates on facebook?

Paris, some time ago. They still do it better.

Cell Phone stories: First in a series

Food court level, Citicorp building, midtown . . .

Homeland security cops patrol outside with heavy machine guns, bulletproof vests, and helmets . .

Inside, the tables are all taken. Next to me a dozen women critique each other’s CVs, discuss job search/ interview strategies. I get the sense they meet every couple of weeks to help each other through the recession . . .

A blonde woman is across the concourse, sitting alone.  Young, maybe early 20’s, with long blond hair, grey pinstripe pant suit. Pretty, in a generic way. Leaning over what looks like a book or newspaper, reading intently, with earphones in her ears. I thought of how unusual it was to see a young woman like that actually reading something on paper as opposed to staring into a laptoop or texting on her cell . . .

Then she is talking, with the earplugs still in. Quietly at first, a little nervous, then growing more animated. She has a flat accent, maybe Southwestern. As she is talking, she expresses herself with her hands, nodding aggressively as the other party makes a point, then laughing, flashing her eyes, touching her hair. Flirting with the person on the other end of the line. Putting her hands on her hips, threading her hair through her fingers through it so it falls back, then putting her hands together and rubbing them as she makes a point. Her voice getting louder and louder, as she reads from the papers spread in front of her.

Ordinarily, I am irritated by people yapping on their cells like this, forcing their one-side and intrusive conversation into my space. But I found this woman fascinating. Her gaze seemed to be focused just a few inches in front of her face. Except for her voice, she seemed like she had been surrounded by some sort of vacuum tube and pulled from the room, and she wasn’t a person at all, but some sort of hologram with this flat Southwestern voice. Like she’d been beamed right into the medium of the phone.

Such, such is the world we live in now . . .

Martin Luther King Day

Tis Martin Luther King Day here in the US and A . . .

I found this on youtube (where else), the entire ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, from MLK walking on the podium to the incredible finish. I’ve never heard the speech in its entirety before, only the great cadence towards the end. The whole is as complex and beautiful as lyric poetry, about as good as oratory gets. As moving as it was when I first heard it as a teenager in small-town Canada (off a recording off course – I’m not THAT old . . .)

From 1968, Martin Luther King’s last speech, before he was assassinated. You can hear the anger in his voice, and maybe resignation as well, not for his cause, but for his own fate.

“I may not get there with you . . . but we as a people will reach the promised land . . . “

The very best of American oratory, the great ideals which still guide the American nation, despite everything . . .

Brooklyn’s Grand Central Station

Underwhelming . . .

This seems to be the consensus among the people I know in Brooklyn (and much of the Brooklyn blogosphere), and I have to concur. Especially after 8 years and $108 million ( 2 and half years late and $16 million over budget). The soaring windows are a nice touch, as is the limestone thing at the top of the stairs, but atmosphere, grandeur, the public space that should be a part of any train stations, are sorely lacking. This is the gateway to Brooklyn and the soon-to-be-constructed Atlantic Yards?

I admit that I was excited, almost despite myself, to see an actual train station finally re-opening where the original Atlantic Station was torn down in 1988. For years after I first moved here in 93, this was a pit in the ground, with a little tin shack to mark the station entrance. You’d descend a filthy stairwell into bedlam – crashing trains, harried crowds rushing though tunnels where the crumbling, mildew-stained concrete walls, blaring announcements and, eventually, a continual backdrop of jackhammers and construction hoardings. It went on for so long I began to think of the noise and unpleasantness as the station’s natural state, and would only go down if I absolutely had to.

So the new station is an improvement on all that. Still – eight years for a few steps, a glass front, some limestone, and three arches leading into a shopping mall?

Because the station, if you can call it that, is part of Atlantic Terminal, a dark and deeply unlovely mall whose chief aesthetic achievement is that it is marginally more atmospheric than the Atlantic Centre behind it, a mall which strives to have no atmosphere at all. When I tried to take a photograph inside Atlantic Terminal, a harried, nervous looking security guard came out and said: “no pictures – they can put you in prison for that,” though I don’t know what ‘they’ are worried about, since, well, it’s a mall. Outside, on Flatbush, is some of the worst traffic in Brooklyn and, traversing the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic, where heavy traffic barrels down six lanes off the Manhattan Bridge then veers north, south and east into Brooklyn, is a deeply unpleasant and even dangerous experience. The Atlantic Yards, and the basketball arena, will only make the traffic, and the notion of being anywhere near that traffic, much, much worse.

The Atlantic Terminal is owned by Bruce Ratner, the same dude behind the aforementioned Atlantic Yards development, which promises to bring a section of mid-town Manhattan to central Brooklyn, and pretty much over-run the two neighborhoods I’ve lived longest in New York, Fort Greene and downtown Brooklyn. From the time I lived around the corner, up behind what was the Daily News Plant, the area has been a pit, so some kind of development is welcome. But if the Atlantic Terminal is anything to go by, Brooklyn is in a lot of trouble.

Atlantic Station circa WW2 (from aart.aarchives.com).

And the original Atlantic Station? It had an open concourse, benches, and big glass panels on the roof which must have let in the same slightly milky light you find animating the beautiful Victorian stations in England. Like so much fine architecture – the original Penn Station is most notorious example – it was allowed to decay, then someone thought they could make money by developing the site and station was declared beyond repair and torn down. Before construction could get started, the last recession kicked in, the developers ran out of money and left the pit I discovered and wondered about five years later. Thus, thus, has been the way in so many of our cities . ..

You can see photographs of the original station at arrts-arrchives.com (thanks to Brooklyn Born for telling me about the site).

All that remains of the original station is this lonely adjunct, marooned on a traffic island across the street, serving I don’t know what function.

New York Times City Room has a positive if bland take

Haiti

I was going to write a series of blog posts commenting things happening around Brooklyn, but events in Haiti overshadow that. The earthquake has flattened a good part of Port au Prince, the capital, and estimates put over a hundred thousand dead.

I am Canadian and our head of state, the Governor General (an albeit largely ceremonial role), the elegant Michaelle Jean, is Haitian born (she came to Canada at age eleven). She made a very emotional appeal today on Canadian television. Ms. Jean has relatives in Haiti, and maintains many links there, and in turn, Haiti has many links with Canada. Montreal in particular has a very large Haitian community.

There is a mass of information out there, in everything from the big newspapers to blogs to twitter updates.  I don’t see how I can add anything useful here. I will donate to the Red Cross this evening. They seem the safest, and most efficient organization. Hopefully, this response to this disaster will be as quick and efficient as possible, and no more lives will be lost.

Sideways to California . . .

Trolley tracks at the Santee Mall, Santee Town centre (San Diego).

Back in the city, back in the cold . . .

Spent the holidays in sunny San Diego, which is sort of an anti-New York, though a city of strangers in its own right.

I’d never been out to California before, though I’m familiar with the urban model from growing up in western Canada. But for a few blocks downtown, San Diego is built almost entirely around the car. This isn’t news of course, but since I don’t drive, and have managed to live in cities where a car isn’t a necessity since my late teens, it’s always a bit of a culture shock to go back to the car world . . .

Big box malls abound. They are so numerous, so uniform, that one night we got lost getting back to the suburb where we were staying and literally had no idea where we were, since every mall was identical – same Target, Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, Bed, Bath and Beyond (and so on). Even the houses seem built around the car – self-enclosed (often gated – they love their gated communities in San D.) The only neighboring stores or, God forbid, bars, in a strip mall built on a feeder road to a main highway. The sky, the colours are amazing – I saw colours I’d never seen before – and this entirely created, functional environment seemed an odd counterpart to the fantastic landscape. As I do whenever I go back to Western Canada, I thought that this was how space colonies will look like – functional adjuncts to the landscape around them.

Yet I got used to it. Even if you have to get into a car to get to them, the country, the beaches, are spectacular. Perhaps this sis a key to Western cities – they aren’t so much a suburb to a downtown, as suburbs to the land around them. Even the malls have a certain prosaic easiness. My local Starbucks – a half-hour bike ride down a busy semi-highway – was a quiet and cordial place to have coffee and write in the morning. Same people every morning, carving out their little bit of community. Hardly an cell phones – a lot more pleasant than the average ‘independent’ cafe in Brooklyn for example . . .

One afternoon when I caught the trolley right down to Tijuana. The trolley runs from the northern edge of the city to the border, curving through the highways, the valleys, skirting the ocean into downtown and beyond. Just off the pleasant colonial buildings, the twin streets lined with generic sports bars and ‘Irish’ pubs, comes streets of ragged, homeless men, white, black, Hispanic hanging out in front of vacant lots and boarded up storefronts. One guy stood up in full view of the trolley, pulling up his pants after crapping in a doorway.

Then beyond city centre, the navy base with lines of docked aircraft carriers, as tall as a Manhattan skyscraper, serviced by even taller cranes, lit up in the brilliant San Diego sunset by even more brilliant floodlights.

Then a bridge, curving up fifty, sixty stories, like a bridge into space.

Homeless encampment under bridge at Santee, just outside San Diego.

On past an ocean of trailer parks, non-descript main streets of motels, fast-food joints, auto-body shops, until the city of Tijuana appears, sprawling across a hillside and from a distance looking like any American city. A ferris wheel rises from a spot near the bottom of the packed-in buildings. A bridge extends over what I realized after a moment is a river seperating the two. Hundreds of Mexicans, looking reasonably well-dressed in jeans, embroidered work shirts or more generic ball caps and runners, streamed over the bridge, giving what seemed like a festive mood and at the bottom of the streetcar tracks is customs and immigration, the door yawning open as if changing countries was as easy as walking into a mall. American immigration officers on a break strolled back and forth, relaxed, joking with each other.

Odd to think then that 80 murders had taken place in Tijuana in December as rival drug gangs battle over turf, part of a narco-war engulfing and corrupting the entire country, giving Mexico, a local bartender told me later, a higher murder rate than Afghanistan.

Next post: Return to New York . . .

Happy 2010 . . .

A new year is upon us. Although the new decade doesn’t technically start until 2011, we all know it starts now . . .

And all I can say is: Thank God whatever the 2000-2009 decade is over. At last. I was just thinking about waking up on Jan 1st, 2000, mildly disappointed that the Y2K didn’t happen, in any form, with absolutely no notion of what was to come . . .

NY Billboards

Grand street side of Grand st-Metropolitan in Williamsburg.

I’ve always liked how New Yorkers deface their billboards in the subway. Unlike, say, Canada or even London (admittedly in London the authorities put the billboards across the electrified tracks, making it difficult – and dangerous – to get at them), New Yorkers merrily abuse the advertising that appears in the subway system, tearing off strips to juxtapose two or three different ads, making comments, drawing figures – or all three, until the original ad has been rendered into something else entirely. This has always seemed like a refreshingly anarachic response to corporate culture. Thankfully, even in these goody-two shoes, hyper-gentrified Bloomberg days, this tradition doesn’t seem to have disappeared entirely.

This in Williamsburg again. In the middle left, someone has thought to correct the original commentators grammar, complete with a useful lesson on the use of ‘we’re’.

Somewhere in Manhattan.

This poster, along with comments, appeared in Bedford Nostrand subway station shortly before the NYC Marathon

Observations: God’s Will

Riding the G train, the cross-Brooklyn local, on a Saturday afternoon . . .

A big guy was sitting by the door with a little kid. The kid was maybe five or six, of indeterminate sex, except for a set of pink rubber boots. Probably a girl. The guy had a big head and thick, almost coke-bottle glasses with thick rims. He looked almost exactly like a friend of mine, a painter who lives off the G in Williamsburg, except that his neck and wrists and even his hands were covered in tattoos, fiery metalhead tattoos, with letters tattooed across the knuckles of each hand, which at first I thought read GODS W111. Yet he looked far too mild-mannered to be a hardcore metalhead and from the way he sat with the little girl he appeared to be her father.

Tehy had a book, a trade paperback with a black cover and big yellow letters on the front. The little girl spelled out the title: “O, W, O . . .”

“That’s an ‘I’,” the guy corrected her a little sternly. Then: “Do you want to read it?”

“No!” The little girl giggled. “Its boring!”

“Boring! Maybe if I read it to you . . . “

“Okay!” The little girl wriggled close to him, starting in the middle of the book, and reading over her shoulder so she could see the page. He read in a soft, flat voice and I could barely hear him over the clattering of the train. “The theoretical . . . backlash of the administrative mindset . . . multiplicity of identities . . . “

From what little I heard it sounded like a combination of Derrida, a political pamphlet, and an office memo. He read slowly, deliberately, turning the page while the little girl squirmed in her seat, laughing at first then looking confused then laughing again and I couldn’t tell if the guy was being ironic and this was a recurring game with them, or if he was serious and she was laughing at him because he did that kind of thing all the time . . .

When I got off the train, I realized his knuckles read ‘God’s Will’. When I got home I googled the phrase, wondering if it was a band. But no band came out and I wondered if he hadn’t been some sort of Christian metalhead, like those Christian hardcore kids I’d read about somewhere, out thrashing for Jesus . . .

Christ-core band Norma Jean