New York City
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Correction: A friend correctly points out that alternate side was suspended because of a “lesser-known” Jewish holiday, not due to an obscure civic holiday. Juan regrets the error.
Although I don’t own a car, I almost always catch wind of whether “alternate side” is suspended for the day. For those unfamiliar with the intricacies of New York City on-street parking, “alternate side” refers to the schedule when most New York City streets are swept, which forces car owners to move their cars long enough for the sweepers to scatter trash around the street. On one day, one side is swept, and on another day, the “alternate side” is swept. The frequency of the sweeping varies, but both sides of most streets are swept at least once a week.
Each morning, the local news media announce whether “alternate side” is suspended, usually due to a civil or religious holiday observance. Today, June 5, alternate side is suspended, but I couldn’t figure out why.
It turns out that today is the first Thursday of June, and in New York City, that’s a school holiday known as Chancellor’s Conference Day. Before 2005, it was known as Brooklyn-Queens Day. Back in 2003, The New York Times explained the quirky school holiday.
If you happen to attend public school in Brooklyn or Queens, chances are you are sleeping late and may never glimpse this article because today is all about leisure. If you are stuck in Manhattan, the Bronx or Staten Island, on the other hand, suck it up and get to class.
Such are the vagaries of Brooklyn-Queens Day, a relic of a school holiday that is exclusively for students and teachers in two boroughs. Even weirder than the holiday’s existence, perhaps, is that nobody seems to know why it exists.
After 2005, the city renamed the school holiday and expanded to the other boroughs. I’m pretty sure this is why “alternate side” is suspended. But it is fine that one side of the street won’t get swept today. Close to an inch of rain fell on the city this morning.
The other day, I received a letter in the mail from Google. I wasn’t sure if it was related to my Google Apps account, all the unflattering things I say about them, or the fact that I’ve been circulating an image of “street art” that is critical of their surveillance over our online activities.
It turned out that it was none of those things. Once I opened it, I learned that people in my neighborhood of Long Island City have been searching Google for me, and they were just trying to sell me on AdWords.
Your current customers likely search for your business by name (e.g., “Juan Monroy”) and, as a result, your Google listing shows up in their search results.
Prospective customers however tend to search by topic and city (e.g., Flowers “Long Island City”), in which case it’s likely your business won’t show up…
I wonder what business they are referencing. Because I certainly don’t sell flowers! T-shirts, maybe, but not flowers.
Although I bike to work just about every day that it’s not raining (or snowing) and the forecasted high is around 40° Fahrenheit, I tried to get in the spirit of “Bring Your Bicycle to Work” Week. My current rides to work are a little less intense than usual because my semester at Fordham has ended, and I’m now only commuting to two jobs, instead of three…or four, as I did in the fall. If you’re biking to work this week, I hope you’re having a better experience than me.
Monday
I rode to NYU just fine and without incident. It was a gorgeous day, the morning temperature was already around 60° when I hit the road. I even arrived at work with a little sweat on my back, which is the first time that had happened since August.
On Sunday morning, I woke up with a sore throat, which led me to call of my plans to ride to Cold Spring. By Monday afternoon, it was pretty clear that I was coming down with a cold, but I was determined to ride to my next job, at Queens College, twelve miles away, through some of the least bike-friendly parts of New York City. I’ve done it before, most recently on an unseasonably balmy day in December, and I was lucky to be alive at the end of it. But that was five months ago, and I was ready for the challenge anew.
I arrived there fine. No driver tried to kill me, I didn’t get lost, and because it there was plenty of daylight, I was able to see and avoid every pothole—and there were many—on Grand Street/Avenue, a third-world, potholed artery between Williamsburg and Rego Park. By 6:30, I was ready to start my last Media Technologies lecture of the semester.
Very little invigorates me like lecturing. I might put insomniac undergraduates to sleep, but I am fired up because I get to hear myself talk for three hours. After building up all that energy, I was ready to ride home, nine miles, from Queens College to Long Island City. I strapped on my new lights and was ready to head out.
I didn’t get very far. I was cruising downhill about a mile from campus when I hit a pothole. Thankfully, I was riding in the drops so when the bike jolted back up out of the pothole, my hands continued to grip the handlebars, allowing me to maintain control of the bike. However, it did a number on my rear wheel, ripping a hole in the tube. By the time my tire went flat, I was already up the hill and was only about a mile from the nearest subway station.
My first day of Bike to Work Week ended with a punctured tube.
All things considered, it was the best of all possible outcomes: I didn’t fall off the bike, my wheel didn’t bend, my tire was intact, and it was the rear wheel that took the brunt of the force, not my front. If it were the front wheel, I would have ended up on the pavement for sure. But still, my first day observing Bike to Work Week ended with a trip home on the E train.
Tuesday
The first thing I did in the morning was replace my damaged tube. Since I was removing the rear wheel, I cleaned out the drivetrain, which was long overdue. A half hour later, my hands were covered in grease and grime, but my chainring, freewheel, and chain were clean and shiny.
After putting everything back together, I began to inflate my tire. But at around 80 psi, my floor pump stopped pumping. I took it apart and I found that the rubber o-ring inside my pump, which is what pressurizes the air to inflate your tires, had ripped. I would need a new o-ring to rebuild the pump, which you can buy online from Specialized for about $5 (plus a usurious $8 shipping-and-handling charge). That still beats shelling out $50 for a new pump.
Apparently, you’re supposed to lube this once a year. I never did so in ten years of owning this pump. (Also, the linoleum in our kitchen is cracking.)
My plan was to head to the local bike shop to use their pump to get my tires to 110 psi. I strapped on my backpack, shoved my water bottle into my bottle cage, strapped my pant cuffs, and then headed out the door.
Notice that I forgot something. It wasn’t my keys, my wallet, or my phone.
By the time I got to Manhattan, I realized that I didn’t bring my lock. Thankfully, my coworker let me sneak my bike inside the building and stash it in a storage closet. Like the flat tire from the day before, it wasn’t devastating, but for a seasoned bike commuter, it was a rookie mistake.
Wednesday
That cold I was coming down with on Sunday and Monday has turned “full-blown” today. Although it’s a lovely day today, I am pretty much housebound today.
It’s also a work-from-home day.
Looking forward, here’s what I am expecting for Bike To Work Week.
Thursday
According to the forecast on Monday it was supposed to rain all day Thursday. That has been downgraded to breezy conditions. I’ll take that and ride to and from NYU.
Friday
Friday is National Bike to Work Day. A local bike and pedestrian advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives, stages fueling stations at the East River crossings. I’m volunteering at the Long Island City approach of the Queensborough–59th Street–Ed Koch Bridge, between 6:45 and 8:45 AM. If you stop by, I’ll hand you an extra Kind bar.
There’s also an after-work party for intrepid bike commuters to share their horror stories and to decide that they’re…
- never doing this again, or
- saying, “screw the MTA, I’m never not riding to work…until it gets above 80°…then to hell with summer, I’m not riding until fall…until it gets below 50°…then screw winter…”
I’m still not sure which camp is mine.
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A NBC television crew sets up outside of the RCA Pavilion at the New York City World’s Fair, 1939.
Last Tuesday, a bunch of people went to Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the site of the 1964 World’s Fair to tour the Phillip Johnson–designed New York State Pavilion. The Pavilion was open to the public to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair. As with any free event in New York City, there was an hours-long line, and two people I know that went didn’t even get inside despite waiting over four hours.
Although it is still standing, the New York State Pavilion is in dire need of attention. Restoring or repairing it could cost as much as $75 million, and demolishing it would still cost around $14 million. These huge sums however have not deterred many groups from trying to restore the structure, a rare example of Googie architecture in New York City.
Some of the efforts to preserve the Pavilion include:
The World of Tomorrow… Tomorrow
Flashing back even further, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park was also home to the 1939’s World Fair, and on April 30, 1939, seventy-five years ago today, the 1939 World’s Fair opened to the public. This date, by the way, was also the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington.
A statue representing the Freedom of the Press stands opposite a statue of George Washington, inaugurated 150 years earlier as the first president of the United States. (AP Photo.)
Speaking of presidents, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the Fair, the first such exposition in his home state.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt opens the 1939 World’s Fair. (AP Photo/John Lindsay)
The theme of the 1939 World’s Fair was the “World of Tomorrow.” Many of the corporate exhibits, such as General Motor’s Futurama, anticipated the role that consumerism would play in revolutionizing culture. The highways that would reshape the American landscape a decade later, for example, were on display as models at the Futurama exhibit.
Highways of the future. “Futurama” exhibit. New York City World’s Fair. (New York Public Library, Digital ID: 1674383.)
Now We Add Sight to Sound
To media scholars, the 1939’s World Fair is synonymous with the introduction of television. Although they didn’t invent it, RCA introduced television to the American public and, in very simple terms, explained its purpose.
RCA President, David Sarnoff, at the RCA Pavilion, New York City World’s Fair, 1939. (New York Public Library, Digital ID: 1681003.)
David Sarnoff, the president of RCA, clearly defined how television would work:
Now we add sight to sound.
Regardless of what television could do, RCA’s presentation of television introduced it with a clear purpose. RCA would guide television as an extension of radio. It would offer similar programming to what Americans heard on the radio in the 1930s, but with the addition of pictures. In the next decade, television would in effect supplant radio as the dominant entertainment medium, but it would still offer mostly entertainment programming sponsored by advertisers.
Or, you know, radio with pictures.
A few years ago, the New York Public Library curated an online exhibit of the 1939 World’s Fair, complete with an accompanying iPad app. It’s an informative way to lose a few hours.
Nick Zedd, a seminal figure in a New York filmmaking movement he called “The Cinema of Transgression,” will be in Brooklyn’s Fire Proof Gallery for the opening of The Return of the End of New York: Paintings by Nick Zedd with works by John O’Grodnick. The opening reception is at the Brooklyn Fire Proof Gallery on Friday, April 25, 6:00 to 9:00 PM, and the show continues for one day only on April 26, noon to 6:00 PM, with a screening to start at 7:00 PM.
If you’re a film scholar and want to teach your students the films of Nick Zedd, please send them to this event because you might not be able to screen his films in class without someone asking for money. In 2012, Zedd, or someone claiming to be him, wrote me to ask that I pay him for screening some of his films in a class I taught in 2006.
Dear Sir,
I was flattered to see that my films were included in your course New York Independents.
I was wondering if I might be monetarily compensated for the screening of my work to the students.
Best Wishes,
Nick Zedd
This remains the only time a filmmaker ever asked me to pay for screening his or her films in class. That’s probaly because instructors are allowed to screen audiovisual works in face-to-face classroom teaching without securing public performance rights, and copyright holders asking for payment is a futile exercise.
But because his request was so courteous, I might go to the show this weekend after all.
I’ve been complaining about the cold since Thanksgiving Day, when I took a Turkey Day bike ride to Piermont to turbocharge my metabolism. (It didn’t work, by the way.) That was a long time ago, which means that this has been the longest winter ever.
Since I started bike riding again in March, we’ve had some respite from the cold with some days warming up to 50°, 60°, and even 70°. This past weekend was no exception as it was almost hot outside. However, any hint of warm weather gave way to a cold snap that dropped rain, ice, and then snow on us Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, there was a thin but visible layer of snow on parked cars. Watching drivers scraping snow and ice off their windshields seemed unimaginable on Sunday, when the temperature hovered around 70°, and I got my first sunburn of the year.
If mid-April seems a bit late for a snowfall in New York City, it is. Tuesday night’s snow was the latest day for measurable spring snowfall in Central Park.
By Wednesday morning, after the snowfall had stopped, the morning air was cold but not bitter enough to stop me from riding to work. That was too bad because riding over the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan was nearly impossible: the bike-and-pedestrian path was covered in slush.
I ended up walking across the bridge because my tires are as thin and slick as they come, and I didn’t dare to slip and slide en route to 9:00 AM class, especially when I had my MacBook Pro in my backpack. That computer has been through enough, as have we all over this winter.
In the last two weeks, Long Island City has hosted at least two events attesting to the changes in the neighborhood.
The first was the April 5th opening at the Jeffrey Leder Gallery for Whitewashed, a show featuring the artists of the 5Pointz Aerosol Arts Center. In the middle of the night late last year, the owner of the property famously painted over the graffiti with white paint. The graffiti that adorned the building for years made 5Pointz a regular stop for visitors to Long Island City, but the owner feared that preservationists might make it impossible to tear down the building and block a pending residential development on the property.
The opening for Whitewashed was much more festive event than most other openings at Leder’s gallery. Visitors so packed the two-story brownstone building that about twenty people had to leave before I could squeeze into the gallery space. A good number of the artists were also selling some prints of their work, and the gallery staff were busy processing sale after sale of those works, affordably priced between $20 and $50. Adding to the dynamic energy of the evening were about a half-dozen of the featured artists making drawings on-the-spot. By the time I left, the room had an noticeable smell of paint, all coming from those ubiquitous paint pens.
On Friday night, the Center for Holographic Arts threw a farewell party in the bottom two floors of the Clock Tower Building at Queens Plaza. The space had been remarkably transformed from their previous show last month, which had to close early to make way for this farewell party and exhibition. Both the ground floor and the basement were packed with holographic and stereoscopic works, ranging from small postcard-sized still photographs to fifty-foot–long wall projections. The amount of work needed to stage this show was even more remarkable when you consider that this exhibition was for one night only. The “Holocenter,” as most of us have come to call it, has to vacate this space by the end of this month because, according to the Center’s staff, the space was sold to developers.
The two shows represent the changes in Long Island City that everyone with a stake in the neighborhood has anticipated for years. The abandoned industrial buildings had once allowed upstart artists to establish studios and gallery spaces. When I first moved to New York in 2001, I had heard of Long Island City emerging as an arts center. Although part of that was due to the Museum of Modern Art moving its primary gallery space to Queens in 2002, it was the artists who occupied the buildings that gave the neighborhood its excitement.
Today, the situation is different. The financial crisis of 2008 is a fading memory for real estate developers and well-heeled buyers. There are apartment buildings everywhere, and those apartments are fetching stratospherically crazy prices. At one time, I was able to name the high-rise apartment buildings on Center Boulevard: City Lights, the East Coast, and the Avalon. But now, I can’t do that anymore. There’s too many of them. After three decades of false starts as the “next big place,” the value of the land for residential development is forcing a fundamental change to the neighborhood. Over the course of a generation, Long Island City has evolved from industrial district to post-industrial desert to residential neighborhood.
At least it was nice to say good-bye.
The fine folks at Field Notes, who produce some very simple and elegant notebooks, have released a limited, seasonal run of notebooks with actual wood covers.
Although the wood cover is supposed to evoke wood as the source of all modern papers, they also evoke the material and grain of a baseball bat.
New Yorkers can get these books locally at Bergino Baseball Clubhouse, at 67 East 11th St, in Manhattan. For everyone else, the Internet is your friend.
(Via @berginobaseball.)
Speaking of art spaces in Long Island City making way for real estate developments, the Center for the Holographic Arts, which currently occupies the ground floor of the Clock Tower Building in Long Island City, will be leaving on April 13.
Before they vacate, they are staging one last party on April 11. There will be food, music, adult beverages, and, of course, holographic art. Tickets are available for a donation, via Eventbrite.
A notable highlight of this space is the subterranean lounge, located in an old bank vault, although the last time I was there it kind of smelled like pee.
Earlier this year, the owner of the 5Pointz building and site destroyed the work of dozens of graffiti artists by covering the walls with white paint. This was the final step in clearing the site of the artists for a planned real estate development project.
Beginning this Saturday, April 5, the artists whose work was destroyed will be part of an exhibition at the Jeffrey Leder Gallery in Long Island City.
Jeffrey Leder Gallery is excited to present Whitewash, an exhibit featuring 12 artists that worked on or photographed the 5Pointz walls for many years. They have created artworks that explore their reactions to having their and others’ art painted over – Whitewashed.
The gallery is located on 45th Road, in Long Island City, just steps from the 5Pointz site. The opening is on April 5, from 6:00 – 9:00 PM. Because it’s not a school night, I recommend making your own after-party at the Shannon Pot, a bar that relocated down the street to make room for this same development at the 5Pointz site.
