Okay, I admit it: there’s lots of pictures of the Chrysler Building. Even on this blog. There’s really nothing new about this picture. Not even the framing with the American flags.
But I do love looking at that building. No excuses necessary. Ain’t it grand?
-H
Yeah. “Italian Harlem”. I didn’t know it existed until recently and found a very small article on it. I knew I was headed to Spanish Harlem and thought I’d stop by. The article had mentioned the area was very small and confined to just a single street (Pleasant Avenue) from 114th Street to 119th. I had to check it out. If nothing else, I figured I could get some good Italian food.
I also wanted to see a better Manhattan home for the Italians than the rapidly vanishing Little Italy. (It turned out that the next day I went to Brooklyn and saw a thriving Italian area where the Giglio festival was held. But that’s not Manhattan.)
Folks, just from my eyeballing, there’s very, very little left of Italian Harlem.
And I couldn’t find any restaurants. There were a couple of little foodstores like everyplace in Manhattan. I saw a number of people who could have been Italian (they didn’t look particularly Spanish/Hispanic to me, at least; and I heard a few talking in idiomatic American accents). But the place is just…zip.
It has a couple of impressive areas. The first was the “Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics“. It’s a magnet high school for science and has a long history in the area.
So I wandered through the area. It was really, really empty. It had some nice buildings and the like, but nothing that made you want to move there or to renovate. If you go a little further to the north and west, in regular Harlem you’ll find lots of magnificent buildings (although many in sore need of some really heavy duty maintenance). Here, just okay stuff.
At the north end of Pleasant Avenue, there’s a huge expanse of an exercise area. Really, really big. And by big, I mean huge. All cemented flat and designed as a sports area. There was a cement baseball/softball area, there were a number of basketball hoops (I saw three or so just near the fence). But not a single person. The place, like most of Italian Harlem, just seemed to be…empty and locked up.
There are two major Churches in the area: Holy Rosary Church and Mt. Carmel. There’s even a small school in the area. Not unexpected and it was empty, too. Of course, I went on a Saturday and didn’t expect the kids to be hanging around there. But to have a huge exercise area just empty? I dunno. (It wasn’t in good repair, but seemed servicable for softball/kickball/whatever. The hoops were all bent out of shape, though.)
Pleasant Avenue is bounded by a park to the south (I’ll post on that separately) and what look like projects to the north. In between, it’s mostly just quiet. Now, in Manhattan that’s a good thing, but I had hoped for a little more.
For full disclosure, it did have one really nice feature. There were a number of community gardens scattered in the area. Regular readers know I love those community gardens and I did find one very unusual one (well, at least different) and I’ll post on those separately.
-H
I’ve said it on this blog many times: NYC is filled with community gardens. Small and intimate, many of these are the work of a handful of volunteers and communities that want to have some small part of nature in this town. Yeah, we’ve got Central Park and a dozen other big parks; but there’s great pleasure in having a pleasant area all of your own…you and a few thousand of your neighbors.
In Spanish Harlem, on Pleasant Avenue are several of these gardens. And, of course, I went to ’em all. This first one is called Pleasant Village Community Garden. It’s somewhere around 119th Street or so. According to a nearly ruined sign on the exterior fence, it was created between 1978 and 1982 by Rose Gardella. However, it seems to have taken until 1997 to become a park.
The area of Harlem I was walking through was pretty deserted that day, but each of the gardens had people there. That’s the mark of a pretty good thing, I would say.
As I always love to point out, NYC parks (and gardens) generally have lots of places to sit.
All in all, this place really wasn’t a regimented garden. Stuff grew here and there. One thing I liked about it was the surrounding buildings. They looked pretty run down, but you don’t sneeze at a view of a garden in NYC, so I’d call the residents pretty fortunate to have one.
And speaking of the gardens, this was one that seemed to take the idea of a “garden” pretty seriously. There seemed to be a number of individual plots where residents had veggies growing. Now, that’s what makes a real garden.
-H
Well, I’ve pretty much done it. The one large area of Manhattan that I hadn’t explored to some degree was Spanish Harlem. I’ve been past it and I wandered through a small section right after I moved to NYC, but I hadn’t really explored. And now I have. That isn’t saying I’ve been everywhere; there are huge areas that I haven’t seen and zillions of small streets I haven’t been up and down. But, I don’t know of any “name” area I haven’t at least visited. Of course, it’s all in my own definition; some areas that I just consider parts of some neighborhood may be very distinct and reject the association.
But for my own sense of smug satisfaction; I’ve been everywhere.
But I’ll admit that I only did a tiny section of Spanish Harlem. Harlem is huge. Gigantic, even, at least by the way that NYC looks at it. Spanish Harlem, like every place else, has multiple names. Lots of folks call it East Harlem. But I like the sound of Spanish Harlem and I’ll keep calling it that.
When I wandered, my main steet of interest was 116th Street between 3rd Avenue and FDR. It’s the main business district area (at least east-west) from what I understand.
Lots of little stores, but there are quite a few chain store places coming in. But the below picture is just one of those shots that captures a lot of the flavor of the place. Perhaps a little more flattering than the rest really is, but there were parts that I liked.
But a lot of the area is just like the below. Ordinary. A bit run down, but not romantically so.
I wandered around for a while. What I was looking for was an area a bit like regular Harlem. That area, as I’ve mentioned a number of times, may be run down; but the architecture is often magnificent. The picture below doesn’t capture anything “magnificent”. Just moderate to okay.
There were two areas that did capture my attention. One of them below was pretty nice. Not perfect, but pretty nice and colorful. They lacked the stoops that would differentiate them from blah to wonderful. Stoops are good.
But mostly, it was just like the next picture. A place to live, but not really a place to visit. I had wanted much more. About the only thing that I liked about the area was the lack of traffic. The streets were nice and wide, too.
The next picture shows another of the better areas. It certainly needed fixing, but it had the makings of a nice place if you threw enough money at it. These really started to look like brownstones; but still, no stoops.
Once again, here’s a picture of wide, open, and empty streets. It was noonish on a Saturday. I know gas is expensive (I read the news and am happily car-less), but there oughta be somebody out.
Okay, below is my last picture of this part of Spanish Harlem. Taken over on 2nd Avenue near 120th Street. What’s interesting about this? Nothing for anyone else; but for me it was different. Or at least had something that I don’t often see. Take a look at the tall building in the center. About 80 percent up on the right side…is an airplane. Just heading to land at LaGuardia. But I so seldom see airplanes that I was absurdly pleased. Heck, sometimes it seems that I seldom see sky.
-H
In my previous post, I detailed how I was in the Williamsburg part of Brooklyn watching the annual celebration of the giglio (lilies) at Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
All was well and good and fun. Well, and slow, but that’s okay.
And then the violence started. Four years in NYC and the first time I see violence is in a Catholic religious procession. Wow.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was thoroughly enjoying the pending convergence of the two giglios (lilies). The saint giglio (also called the “tower giglio”) had already arrived at its destination and was spun around. I took the opportunity to zoom in on the top of it. Nice workmanship. Well done.
In the next photo, you can see the band on the tower giglio’s dais. In turn with the boat giglio, they played music and made announcements.
All of a sudden, to my immediate left, some scuffling broke out amongst the boat giglio’s lift crew. It wasn’t a minor one, but it started very small. Here’s the first picture I took.
You can see that everyone spotted it at the same time. There wasn’t a clear source of the fight, but it just seemed to spring up in that general area.
A couple of seconds later, you can see that it had spread. Closer to me in fact. The cane or baton you see in the next picture was held by the head of the lift crew.
Then it really started getting closer and much more violent. Nobody was hurt (at least that I’m aware of), but you can see the tenseness and the concern really breaking out. The guy in the orange was another leader of the lift crew.
At this point, I began getting concerned for my own safety. My back was against a short wall of flour supplies for a vendor and I couldn’t move. For a few seconds, the crowd surged against me and those around me and I figured the wall would collapse and people would start to fall on me. It wouldn’t be a big drop or anything, but I could feel the flour bags start to shift with the crush as the weight of the scufflers and crowd pressed against me. For a moment, I didn’t want to be there. (But I kept taking my pictures!)
At that moment, the cops started to arrive. They did the first things that cops do in this situation: started yelling for people to get out of the way and started to head toward the perceived source of the disturbance.
And, in response, the fight seemed to shift to a whole different area of the lift crew. Actually, it was in a sub-group that wasn’t even near the giglio. (In the picture below, you can see attention being drawn to that new area.)
I gotta tell you: calling it a “fight” is a bit over the top. For the most part, it just was grappling and shoving. I think I may have seen one fist thrown, but I’m not sure about that. Mostly, the guys in the green shirts just sort of shifted around. There really wasn’t even any yelling. Apart from the cops, at least.
Notice the bystanders. No worries there. At this point it just seemed to be a bit of posturing and bravado on the part of a few lifters.
More fighting, but no more real concern on anyone’s part. You might want to note that the photos were taken about 2 seconds apart. We aren’t talking a long production here. But I was in a great spot to capture what there was that had been going on.
And then the cops arrived in force.
And more force. I had noticed there were a lot of cops in the area much earlier and had just thought they were catching some easy overtime. I guess they knew better than me. I imagine this isn’t all that unusual.
And then the band on the boat giglio started to play some music. Hey, it does have power to soothe the savage breast.
They played and played for a couple of minutes. I don’t think it did much to help, but it sure didn’t hurt.
About two minutes later, there was another minor flare-up. It only lasted a few moments though.
And five minutes later, another lift.
I was in a great spot. Just off the street and right smack dab next to the lifters. I couldn’t have planned it better. (Well, actually, this is sort of what I planned by putting myself next to that wall of flour bags. People kept trying to get me to move back and I’d just say I couldn’t. That forced them to walk past rather than shove me back and out of a good spot.)
Despite the fight, I have to admit that the next sequence of pictures is my favorite. These guys, despite the earlier distraction, were interested in moving this thing just right. They liked what they were doing and they loved the attention.
I mean, look at these guys. They’re having a great time. And good for them.
Right before the last move, I did have a minor encounter with one of the fighters. I assume it was his sister next to me. He came over and started talking with her. It was in English, but he didn’t make any sense. I presume it was the adreneline talking. He kept cussing and saying he had grabbed so and so about the neck and held on and was really pumped about it. One of his friends came over and they compared war stories about the fight, equally incoherent to me. As the band played, the two of them kind of huddled and started jumping up and down in time with the music. And one guy’s elbow kept getting close to my nose. And he was swinging it with the music and bouncing up and down. And, did I mention I couldn’t move away? I managed to lift up my arm between my face and his arm, but it wasn’t needed. Thankfully.
Anyway, on that high note, I left just after the boat giglio passed me. Those two also seemed to have pulled out of the lift as they vanished down the street a moment or two earlier.
So, I missed the joining of the giglio, but I would have been in not as good a position as I had been for the rest of it.
So, was my friend right? Was it a “don’t miss” event? Yeah, I have to admit I did like it. At the very least, I got to see an absolutely genuine Italian neighborhood in celebration. (Little Italy is just mostly a tourist trap.) So, yeah, it was just fine. I just have to remember not to believe their posted times.
-H
Famous Ankles 