Walk #2*
Direction: South down Ft. Washington Ave.
Album: Sound & Color by Alabama Shakes
*walk #1 was not documented. The album was Funeral by Arcade Fire
Around 4:22pm on a Sunday afternoon I step outside into the blinding light of a plague-ridden Washington Heights.
“I wanna touch a human being,”
sang Alabama Shakes. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Weather: Sunny, with a chilly breeze. I always feel a cognitive dissonance when my face is cold but I’m wearing sunglasses. Probably because I’ve never gone skiing.
“Why can’t I catch my breath? Gonna work myself to death.”
I get a message from my Dutch lover as I approach 164th St. He tries to call himself a wuss for crying while watching a TV show. Spells it “wooz”. I think that’s a cuter spelling, honestly. I would be ok with being a wooz.
He asks me: “Do you ever feel like crying without being sad particularly?”
“Oh, yes.”
Having grown up in the South, in an area where the oldest (white) history only goes back to just before the Civil War, I’m frequently fascinated by the history here- in the names, the places, the things I can touch. My neighborhood’s name, and the name of the street I’m on, comes from the Revolutionary War fort that once existed ten blocks from my apartment and now lives on in a few stones and an inscription inside of Bennett Park. At 265 ft above sea level it’s the highest point in Manhattan- not impressive by Denver standards, but one can imagine its strategic utility in wartime.
The street itself, Fort Washington Avenue, begins a few blocks north of its namesake, at the entrance to Fort Tryon Park, jaunts south for a little over 30 blocks, and ends with a neat little curve to the east, where it becomes 159th Street.
“So I just kept going, I just kept going.”
As I approach Broadway to cross it, I see two smiling men greet one another with elbows. The new normal, practiced with joy.
This part of Manhattan, the far north part, narrows in width as the Harlem River carves through between the island and the Bronx. Doesn’t take too much more walking before I’m faced with a choice of turning north or south at Edgecombe Avenue, as the road ends at Highbridge Park, which sits on the promontory known as Coogan’s Bluff, followed by a 175-foot escarpment down to public housing, highways and water. I choose South.
Along Edgecombe, daffodils have popped up from the ground and crowd together in springtime congregations. Didn’t get the memo, I guess.
My goal was to keep going South until the album ended, but at 155th I stumbled upon a path to the Greenway, a waterfont pedestrian and cyclist path that circles the island. I’d never walked it before and, as is becoming increasingly clear, you only live once.
My first greenway views were of more of the escarpment down to Coogan’s Hollow and the Harlem River. I found out when I got home later that 70 years ago, I would have been looking down at a giant, bathtub-shaped baseball stadium called The Polo Grounds, where the Giants played before moving to San Francisco. The stadium got its name from, you guessed it, actual polo grounds, though I doubt this particular location ever saw any mallet-wielding men on horses. The baseball field relocated three times after the city demolished the original grounds in 1889, but they kept the name all the same. Difficult to picture it now- the escarpment today boasts an impressive amount of trash, probably mostly pollinated there by the wind (but how did a tire get there?), and the public housing buildings in the hollow itself look like any of the others dotting the streets of this city.
Acres of land, completely reinvented.
“I looked at you and you looked into me / And we saw in each other everything.”
New York hits and comforts, obscures and reveals, is in turn encouraging and cruel. It sets you up for all you’ve wanted in life, knowing it can snatch it away at any time, demolish it and turn it into something else that suits it. And sometimes it does. Sometimes people just need housing. We need so much right now.
A striped sheet hangs out of one of the apartment windows, stark against the brown bricks like a makeshift surrender.
I make it to the Harlem River. It ignores me as it trundles along on its own Sunday business, casually glittering in the post-brunch sunlight. I move on.
“Loving so deeply I’m in over my head.”
The album ends. Alabama Shakes has sung their piece, and I inspect the area where the music has led me. Under a highway overpass (hmm), standing next to two broken eggs, and a third that has somehow survived.
Let’s all hope to be the third.
Stay safe out there.
-ks-
