Famous Ankles

At the end of Alphabet City is the Jacob Riis Housing projects.  I was there on a very cold day and the smart people, unlike Famous Ankles, were inside and comfortable.

But, I have to admit that I’m not fond of this area.  Not because of anything other than the Soviet-style feel to the place and it’s general lack of any aesthetic that I can appreciate.

I guess that they may look good on paper and they are probably laid out in some nice little grid that I can’t appreciate…but I just don’t think much of the area.

In the middle of the above picture, you can see a bit of artwork that someone put there.  And to the left, there’s a children’s playground.

Here’s a closeup of the sculpture.

And the playground.

I mean, there’s nothing really to object to, but I don’t like it.  Maybe it’s because it looks like a low-income project, and maybe it is one, and such things seem to have a hopelessness about them.  But, I think it is just that it is so very sterile and there’s no signs of life here.  No sign of commercial activity, no sign of much.  I’d just walked through a number of blocks of mostly empty streets, but got none of the negative feeling I got from here.  I hope and expect it’s more my imagination than anything else, but all I can think of is that some architects really didn’t put much of themselves into this place.

-H

On 7th Street between Ave B and Ave C is a garden unlike any other I’ve seen in NYC.  The LES Ecology Center Garden is all about recycling.

Yeah, it really is a garden and they do grow stuff there (it’s winter now so there’s a bit of a hold on “growing stuff”), but it’s all about composting for them.

Like all NYC community gardens, it’s pretty small, but so are a lot of things in NYC, like stores and parking spots.  It ain’t worth complaining about.  Instead, we just make more and more of them.

I guess these community gardens are the one thing I can’t forget about in Alphabet City.  There are so many of them and they are all so small.  One person told me it was an outgrowth of how bad stuff was before Guiliani:  places would go down, perhaps they might be burned down or made completely uninhabitable.  Later, some people with vision would have the City condemn them and then take it over with the City’s blessing and funding.  They then would just put in some of these tiny plots of green that make life a little more livable.

-H