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Category: place

Grand Central Centennial

Grand Central Centennial

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Saturday marked not only the 127th Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but also the 100th birthday of Grand Central Station. It was the second train station on that site, and it opened on Sunday, February 2, 1913. More than 150,000 people visited the first day.

For me, for years, Grand Central was the place I passed through on the way to work. My office was in the Helmsley Building, an ornate wedding cake of a structure that straddles Park Avenue north of the station.

Grand Central was where we grabbed a newspaper and a bagel before starting our day at the oh-so-civilized hour of 9:30 a.m. It was where we went out to lunch for a splurge on our assistant editor salaries. It was where we met people for drinks or dinner. It was even sometimes where we caught the train.

Most of all it was — and still is — a grand public space. One of the grandest. And its currency is not stone or steel but motion. Of trains, of people. 

To stand at the clock in the middle of Grand Central is to be caught up in a great whirl of activity — but somehow to feel the stillness within the movement.


(Not Grand Central, but something of its scale…)

Thoroughbred Park

Thoroughbred Park

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I worry about my hometown, worry that it has lost itself. Known for horses and horse farms, it has allowed some to be enveloped or developed — one into a mega shopping center. Meanwhile, it erects shrines to the thoroughbred.

Like so many places, it may not know what it has, what if offers, just as itself. No need to market or develop. Just leave alone.

How many other places, small hometowns across the country, need the same?

Double Vision

Double Vision

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To walk the streets of my hometown is to see not just what is but what used to be. Vacant storefronts, open blocks, streets moved and one-wayed and changed beyond recognition. They are overlaid with the bustle of the past, with people and places no longer here.

It’s double vision, a condition only open to natives. Here, and here only, I have special powers.

That street, it used to end at the field. I remember when it was cut through. That corner, it was the epicenter of downtown. A dog hung out there, Smiley Pete. He was mean but everyone loved him. When he died, the city put up a plaque to honor him.

Now, even the plaque is gone.

People and Places and Things

People and Places and Things

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In his book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal tells the story of 264 small Japanese figurines called netsuke that generations of his family collected, displayed, lost and found. Made of ivory or wood, these tiny carvings of people or animals are delicate but strong. A cooper making his wheel. A rat with a curved tail. A hare with amber eyes. If you carry one around in your pocket, it “migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget it is there.”

The netsuke are by no means the most valuable artifacts the Ephrussi family possesses, and when the Nazis storm their Vienna home in April of 1938, a loyal maid with an ample apron manages to smuggle the statues out of the house. Everything else — the paintings, silver, porcelain, jewelry, an entire library of cherished incunabula — “the accumulation of all the diligence of the family, a hundred years of possessions” — was taken.

I’ve read other accounts of the Holocaust. This one moved me more than almost any other. The objects people touch and cherish are the keenest and saddest reminders of their absence.

After the war, the maid, Anna, gives the netsuke back to the family, and de Waal eventually inherits them. He treasures the figurines, but he also finds them an affront. “Why should they have got through this war in a hiding place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more.”

This book is not only about people and places and things; it’s also about love and loss and endurance.

(I cherish our old cuckoo clock, and — even though my family disparages me for it —the worn wallpaper, too.)

Up Close

Up Close

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There were fewer people then, but they huddled together. Eleven souls once lived in this tiny house, which consisted of one room downstairs (a bed, a hearth, a table) and a cramped stairway to the second floor. There, scads of islanders were born — including the mother of an old woman I met the day I visited this place, the oldest house in Chincoteague, Virginia (circa 1795).

Meanwhile, there are only three of us now in a once cramped center-hall colonial that is ever more roomy as the children move out. And we are one of the smallest houses around. Nearby neighborhoods are filled with McMansions, their two-story foyers and three-car garages of a different heft and scale than the houses here.

What sort of people does crowding create? And what sort of people emptiness? I re-charge in solitude and would probably have been driven crazy by the cheek-to-jowl existence of my ancestors. But still, there are times when I feel a deep-boned loneliness that’s not so much personal as evolutionary. Maybe it’s the crowded rooms of the past that I miss, the intensely shared life that never let us forget that we’re in this together.

The Measurement of Awe

The Measurement of Awe

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Finally! An article from the Washington Post that is not about the fiscal cliff but about a real geological marvel.

A story headlined “Huge Gap for Geologists: How Old is Grand Canyon?”  explains that until recently, most scientists believed the canyon to be six million years old. But new techniques (and new scientists, one of whom is 36 years old) say the canyon could be 70 million years old. This would put its formation back to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

The article (true to fiscal cliff style journalism) discusses how the new canyon theorists and the old canyon theorists are sparring.”It is simply ludicrous,” sniffs one professor of geology. Adds another: “We can’t put a canyon where they want to put it at the time they want to put it.”

All of this hardly matters when you stand on the lip of the south rim and look into what seems like time itself. Is it six million or 70 million years old?  This question may some day be answered. Will I ever see a scenic vista that moves me more? I was 13 when I first saw the canyon —and I haven’t yet.



(Photo: Grand Canyon National Park Service Flickr site.)

Staying Put

Staying Put

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In The Merry Recluse, the late Caroline Knapp writes about finding home. It wasn’t a grand “ah-hah” moment, she says. “I figured Boston would be an interim city, a place to set down my bags until I moved on to some bigger, more exotic locale … I figured I’d be transient, my sense of place fluid, my attachments focused on people and jobs rather than on location. And then, not long ago, I looked up one day and thought: Oh, my God. I have a life here. I’m not moving. I’m home.”

Her point is that many of us don’t choose our place; our place chooses us. It’s not so much a decision as a non-decision. A not-moving rather than a staying put.

What helped Knapp stay put is the Charles River, “one of the longest, best stretches of flat water for rowing anywhere in the U.S.” and where Knapp would scull four or five times a week.

If we stay here (and it’s always “if”), it will be because of the hollow tree along Little Difficult Run, the one Copper always has to stick his nose in on the days he’s lucky enough to get a walk. It will be because of the mossy hill and the view of treetops I can see from there. It will be because of this one ancient knobby tree stump I always look for because more often than not it trips me up. 

It will be the little things that keep us here.

Election Day

Election Day

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I drove to work today, and as I crossed the Potomac the familiar landmarks loomed solid and significant in the wan winter light. Driving past the White House and the Capitol, I thought about the people who aspire to live and work in those places, people I’ll vote for today.

It does feel momentous, this election. Perhaps because we live in a battleground state and our phone rings half a dozen times or more a day. Perhaps because positions seem to be ossified — the fact that we had our first hard freeze last night, is that a metaphor?

Or perhaps because these polarized times make clear a truth we sometimes forget: that every vote really does make a difference.

(Photo: DClikealocal.com)

Bucophilia

Bucophilia

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It’s still dark at 7 a.m., a cold inky blackness that does not invite exploration.  Leafless trees, downed branches littering the yard, a sky just light enough to promise hope.

It is a season that calls for poetry (as if all seasons didn’t). So I return from the library my arms full of Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Maxine Kumin.

This morning, Kumin makes me smile:

Bucophilia, I call it —
nostalgia over a pastoral vista —
where for all I know the farmer
who owns it or rents it just told his
wife he’d kill her if she left him, and
she did and he did and now here come
the auctioneers, the serious bidders
and an ant-train of gawking onlookers.

Bucophilia — it’s a word I’ll take into the day.

Under Water

Under Water

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When constructing my fantasy life I often get hung up on location. The suburbs are out, and a pied-a-terre is a given (after all, I still have to earn a living); the confusion comes with the country retreat. A cabin in the mountains? A cottage on the shore?

After Sandy, the answer is clearer. After Sandy, the mountains are starting to look pretty good. After Sandy, I wonder: What happens when the places I love are under water?

There’s Venice. But of course with Venice it has always been part of that city’s doomed charm.

And there’s Chincoteague. As the wind and rain pounded us Monday I thought of my time there this summer, the stillness of the refuge, the beach that goes on forever. Does it still? 

And now there’s New York City, too. Sea water coursing through subway tunnels, lapping at the steps of the Stock Exchange. Apocalyptic visions.

People perish; place endures. Or at least it used to. I’m not so sure anymore.

(Lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.)