New York's Subway System Opens
The IRT [Interborough Rapid Transit] Line, which ran from City Hall to 145th @ Broadway, opened to the public in October, 1904.
There's a theory that memory is stored as movement, as in holograms, like newspaper pictures in Harry Potter, rather than in the (very) old-fashioned sense of static bytes or prompts or boring little stationary nodes of data. Which makes sense to me. I can't even conjure up the spelling of a word that it doesn't float around in my mind like a three dimensional flash card, or spiral and uncoil like a smoke ring of elaborate flowing script. But maybe that's just me, and other people really do have those dusty stacks of mental file cabinets, old shoe boxes full of Polaroids and towering cases of index drawers they can rifle through in their heads.
Movement is the strand I'm trying to carry over from the other day, in any event. The East-Meets-West aesthetic issue is just too daunting, at least for the moment, even if the notion of The Floating World applies -- doesn't it?
More than that, I miss New York today. Hence the Subway. The station at 72nd and Broadway, designed by Heins and Lafarge, opened in 1904, the same year as the Ansonia. The New York subway was the first subway I ever rode, and that station, though not the only one, was certainly one by which all subsequent subway stations would be measured. Emerging from, or descending into that little stone and brick "Newe Amsterdam" style structure, wedged on that island in all that traffic...
I was just about to try and pull off an East Side / West Side segue here but I'll spare you. Instead, Gentle Reader, I offer you (something down the middle?): Fifth Avenue, circa but not exactly 1904. To the far left Washington Square (Henry James, Sam Wagstaff), so you're looking west, at about 8th Street --
I think. Behind you would be what Skip used to call in the old days the "Dreaded Eighth Street" whenever we chose that route to wend our way to the East Village on the weekends. All I can remember is lots of shoe stores and being really really high, and how crowded the sidewalks would be.
The noise. The people.
There's a theory that memory is stored as movement, as in holograms, like newspaper pictures in Harry Potter, rather than in the (very) old-fashioned sense of static bytes or prompts or boring little stationary nodes of data. Which makes sense to me. I can't even conjure up the spelling of a word that it doesn't float around in my mind like a three dimensional flash card, or spiral and uncoil like a smoke ring of elaborate flowing script. But maybe that's just me, and other people really do have those dusty stacks of mental file cabinets, old shoe boxes full of Polaroids and towering cases of index drawers they can rifle through in their heads.
Movement is the strand I'm trying to carry over from the other day, in any event. The East-Meets-West aesthetic issue is just too daunting, at least for the moment, even if the notion of The Floating World applies -- doesn't it?
More than that, I miss New York today. Hence the Subway. The station at 72nd and Broadway, designed by Heins and Lafarge, opened in 1904, the same year as the Ansonia. The New York subway was the first subway I ever rode, and that station, though not the only one, was certainly one by which all subsequent subway stations would be measured. Emerging from, or descending into that little stone and brick "Newe Amsterdam" style structure, wedged on that island in all that traffic...
I was just about to try and pull off an East Side / West Side segue here but I'll spare you. Instead, Gentle Reader, I offer you (something down the middle?): Fifth Avenue, circa but not exactly 1904. To the far left Washington Square (Henry James, Sam Wagstaff), so you're looking west, at about 8th Street --
I think. Behind you would be what Skip used to call in the old days the "Dreaded Eighth Street" whenever we chose that route to wend our way to the East Village on the weekends. All I can remember is lots of shoe stores and being really really high, and how crowded the sidewalks would be.
The noise. The people.
dearest george - arrived back in nyc late last night from a biz trip to sf and seattle.........loved today's post and will - in your honor - read your blog on my treo as I step into aforementioned subway station tomorrow en route to greenwich village in metaphorical black beat turtleneck.
My dear,
Just returned from the Ralph's at LaBrea (because it's Shabbos and therefore not as crowded as usual, Saturday morning being a Very Good time to try and shop there) and as I whizzed back home along Sixth St. in the (newly repaired) truck I resolved Never Ever to Post Again, unless someone showed up with an encouraging word, and so ...
thank you my darling. G