New York Diary

as if with treasure-map in hand

One of the first people I spoke to after moving to New York was a Russian woman who lives in my building. She came in with grocery bags as I was retrieving my mail, and I (outsider that I was) thought to ask her where the grocery store was. "I go to the organic vegetable mart, just three blocks down," she answered.

"On Second Ave?" I asked.

"Of course!" she replied in a thickly accented English. "Everything's on Second Ave!"

This, my friends, sums up something strange and wonderful about New York. Everything is on Second Avenue. And everything, equally, is on First Avenue. And Tenth Avenue. And Seventh Avenue. Except for purposes of catching a train or getting to the Port Authority, there is no reason to walk cross-town here, no reason to leave the comfort of your Avenue with anything like quotidian regularity. All normal needs, from new socks to take-out Thai food, exist within a few blocks up- or downtown. Indeed, why would one explore the next block over, much less the next neighborhood over or--gasp!--the next borough over? What wonders could those places possibly hold that could not be gotten two blocks uptown?

As I say, it is a strange and wonderful thing to have everything at one's fingertips like this--but it is, too, a temptation to a kind of cosmopolitan parochialism. We live in this big and varied city, and yet we only ever see the few blocks on our avenue, the small radius containing convenient lunch spots near the office, the walk to and from the bus stop or the subway, and the occasional sports arena, national monument, or performing arts center.

With that in mind, a couple of weekends ago I took the subway into the heart of the Bronx and wandered around among buildings that looked nothing like mine, streets filled with privately-owned cars (unheard of!), and above-ground "subway" trains. This was for no other reason than that I had never been to the Bronx, and had certainly not wandered there on foot. It is a place that is so very near to me in my Manhattan apartment, and yet so far from it that it seems impossibly unlikely that any of my fellow apartment-dwellers will have gone there in the last year for more than a Yankees game.

But now I am exploring New York anew, drawn out by a scavenger hunt forced upon me by the city's library system. For you see, I have been taken in by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and by extension, by Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and by Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence (which, ironically, I own and have safely left in Florida lest it get lost on my hopefully-parepatetic post-collegiate journey). But the NYPL tells me that these books are all perpetually checked-out, or lost, or on hold, or in transit. Yet I continue to devour these stories at the rate of one a day; and as a result, every day I am reduced to figuring out which of the library's 85 branches holds a copy of the next book on-shelf, and which of those few libraries is open until at least 7pm (or, better yet, 8). And then the journey begins: Sunday night, I found myself in Greenwich Village; yesterday it was Brooklyn; today I will be going to the Bronx.

And it occured to me, today, that I could, of course, pick up more than one book at a time. If the Mott Haven Branch where I am going today happens to have three of Cooper's books, then I can grab them all and fill in the gaps when I come to them. There is no need to go every day, book by book, to find the next of my texts. It is silly to hurry off every day to a new and sometimes hard-to-find location if I could save myself the effort.

But I am discovering that I love this forced exploration. It is not aimless wandering: I have a destination, a goal. Yet these excursions are not quite event-oriented, either; I pop into the library for 10 minutes at most, find my book, and leave--and then there I am, with all the time I could want, in Crown Heights or the East Village or Harlem or Parkchester.

Of course I want to get home and read. But I also like the idea that, while I cannot get The Subtle Knife for free on Second Avenue in Manhattan's Upper East Side, I can get it in New York--and I know wherefrom.

posted by Skay @ 6:10 PM