Traffick in the Street Grid

[malsperanza]

I went a couple of weeks ago to say goodbye to a favorite place and mark the end of an era. The old Gotham Book Mart is moving from its curious den on 47th St. (down two steps with the door at an odd angle). It is moving only 2 blocks away, but to a different world. It will still be the Gotham Book Mart, and the sign painted by John Held Jr. back in the 1920s, will hang out front. But it won't be the same, because 47th Street is a Portal, a Threshold, a Wormhole, and 46th St. is just a street.

All great cities have such places: secret doors into other realms. (Rome, most magical and ancient of all secret cities, has hundreds--including La Porta Magica, a literal door. )

So I gathered a few Midtown errands as an excuse and ducked out at lunchtime. And, as sometimes happens to me, was struck by a thunderbolt of delight at being in New York.

This may have been occasioned by my mother's remark the other day that she might come to visit in the fall, if New York is still there after the Repuglicans. Hard to say if she was referring to the possibility that Someone might blow the whole place up in a grand act of terrorism or to the likelihood that a General Miasma of Irreparable Taint will descend on us on Aug 30, and when it finally blows out to sea a week later, we will have been turned into Provo, Utah.

I remember once standing on the nondescript corner of 72nd and Park Ave., while a friend, an architectural historian, waved a hand largely and said with admiration: "These are the most efficient streets in the world." He meant the grid, the flowing parallel lines that at night are transformed into dazzling rivers of red and white lava, and the numbered streets that make navigation so easy. Like the mariners of old, who piloted by sextant and astrolabe and the North Star, we steer by instruments and lights. The Empire State Building is the Gnomon of this great Dial our city: We read our direction by it: North is up from the Needle; South below.

Midtown is not one of my favorite places. It's crowded, it's full of tourists, and it seems to have no soul. The shops are chain stores, the restaurants franchises. The avenues are dull and noisy. And yet the very heart of soulless Midtown possesses no fewer than three Magickal Portals--three of the most powerful ones, in fact. They are connected with the old trades of New York, several of which have mysteriously survived in the glitzy commercial core of the city. Because the old trades have their magic too, as the Freemasons knew.

So, first to the Street of Diamonds. I have to get a stone reset in a bracelet, so I go to 47th Street and wander at random into one of the storefronts that is full of small booths, where artisans work: buying and selling gold and gemstones, resilvering flatware, trafficking in the glitter and flash of the jewelry market, one of the oldest trades in the world. This is perhaps the liveliest street in New York: the commerce is constant, energetic, dubious, fast. The shop is full of Hasidim, standing around in their long coats and side curls, hondling amongst themselves in thick Yiddish. Russian emigré craftsmen with loups screwed into one eye fiddle over tiny oxyacetylene torches with minute bits of goldwork. I have to ask around til I find the one fellow who does silver. Tomorrow, he says, but before 4:00. It's Friday and I leave early. (Because it is the Sabbath at sundown.) I linger over a counter full of tanzanites and signets. How much? I ask. For you? the shopman smiles. For you, a special price. I'll come back, I say. I'll bring the topazes I want set. Topaz, he says, tanzanite, tourmaline, moonstone, I have them all. The Hasids, with their blue eyes under the shadows of broad brims, regard my bare arms coldly. Whore, they are thinking, out alone in a sleeveless shirt with no head covering. But outside on the street the plate-glass windows are filled with glitter and flash: phalanxes and ranked echelons of diamond rings and pins, watches and necklaces, and little velvet trays of loose stones, bright brilliants of fine water and many points weltered together with doubtful heat-treated rubies and sapphires. And the black-coated Hasids at the curbs, on cell phones, palavering with the Spanish couriers.

For a moment my inward eye sees Amsterdam, 1492: the Jews with their pockets full of pearls, negotiating to keep the free port open, while their relatives, lately arrived in haste from the disaster of Spain, stand by with their packs and bundles, wondering: Shall we stay here? Is there room here for us, is there work? Or should we try Venice? Will we be welcome there?

Then down the block for a quick goodbye visit to the Gotham, New York's best bookstore. Wise Men Fish Here, has warned the sign out front for nearly 60 years; and Fish? says Tom, the enormous ginger cat inside. No, says the owner, Andreas Brown. We may have it, but we're packing up the stockroom, everything is in boxes. I stop anyway, to look one last time at the shelves of thin books of poetry in their nook, the ranked rows of signed new novels, the special shelf for Gorey and the one for Kerouac, the corner where Eliot's photo presides over Eliot's oeuvre. The ghost of Miss Steloff, the original owner, is leaning on a table in the back room stacked with quarterly reviews: the Triquarterly, the Virginia Review, TLS. She is laughing at something the ghost of Delmore Schwartz has just said, but it's a melancholy laugh, because after 60 years the Gotham is leaving the Diamond Street and Miss Steloff is not sure if she will go or stay. The ghosts of Joyce and Henry Miller are planning a goodbye bash. Joseph Mitchell has promised to bring oysters from Fulton Street (another Threshold), and Tennessee Williams will supply the bourbon and the charm. The poets smile from their faded photos, tacked anyhow on the walls. Everyone is a little nervous: Will the new place, on the luxe side of Fifth Avenue and so much grander with its antique paneling and plush, be as kind to them? Outside, the murmur of getting and spending in four languages breaks like surf against the quiet world of words on paper.

So, then, out and down the avenue and up the stairs to a third-floor photo studio to get passport photos: Gentleman with camera and oily manner. US passport? he asks in a Middle European accent. US or other? US, I say. It's moved, you know, he says. The passport office: It's on Hudson Street now. Rockefeller Center was too expensive, they didn't want to pay the rent, he says sadly. You go to the Houston Street stop. Smile, please. His walk-in trade must have dwindled badly when that happened. I'm going to renew by mail, I say. He seems disappointed. Indeed, I feel a little deflated myself. What is a passport renewal without the line, the thud of the inky stamps, the ritual of raise-your-hand-and-swear? I'm not in a hurry, I say, apologizing.

Nor am I. Back up to 48th St., to the Street of Music, a block of stores that sell all the musical instruments in the world to all the world's musicians. The brass and woodwinds shops, the strings shops, the guitar shops with their displays of famous axes in the windows, and a press of dazzled teenage boys outside, noses to the glass. Up some narrow stairs again to another small third-floor shop, papered in signed photos of working musicians--some known, none famous. This is the Reeds Store: a man in dreadlocks discussing repairs to his tenor sax by the counter; he tries it out, makes a sweet sound, shakes his head. Behind him a wall gilded with saxophones in all sizes; around us, standing boxes stuffed with bassoons and things like bassoons, but made of bamboo, or of brass. Racks of flutes, shelves of pipes and penny whistles. A didgeridoo in a glass case, a bagpipe in another. A fat gray cat with a wobbly gait pushes her head against my ankles, purring. She walks like that because she got hit by a car, says the guy at the register. Poor thing, I say. Nah, he says. You should see the car. I want three soprano recorders, I say. A player in a Renaissance consort told me that the plastic ones are OK for learning, with a good sound. Yes, he said. They're surprisingly good. What colors? We decide on orange, purple, and green, and a small how-to book. A gift for the Literary Critics, whose parents will not thank me for it. They should be grateful I didn't go to the Timpani Store and get bongos and cymbals and clappers. ("I have a reasonable good ear in music," Nick Bottom says in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. "Let's have the tongs and bones.") I am briefly tempted by a glass flute, prettily painted with flowers, til I remember that I cannot read music and have a tin ear. I leave.

Down the stairs, down the street, across Times Square. This too is a Threshold, but I am not visiting it today. Down 7th Avenue to the Street of Many Colors.

There was a time when the garment industry was the engine of New York; even today, though much of it has moved offshore, the needle trades thrive in the high, musty old office buildings that run east and west off 7th and 8th avenues, fueled by the constant flood of new, poor immigrants: sweatshops cheek by jowl with couture studios, the ones cranking out racks of generic clothes for the Heartland; the others fine tailoring for the Uptown market. A hundred years ago the seamsters were Jewish and Italian and Irish; more recently they were Spanish from the islands and Filipino, now they are Korean and Chinese. 40th Street is lined with shops that supply the clothiers: the Zipper Store ("Nothing But Zippers!"), the Lace Place, the beadwork shops ("por mayor, to the trade," stops you at the door), the ones that sell feathers and trim and passementerie, tassels and winking sequins: glitter and flash. The ones that specialize in bridals: shops like walking into a blizzard, a cloud, hung with curtains of white net and chiffon, tulle and toile, ruffles and puffs of gauze. The vast warehouses with their piled bales and rolls of cotton prints and silks, richly scented stuffs, linen and wool and tissue; the rainbow colors running down walls: the jaquard and paillard, twill and mousseline, buckram and burlap. At Rosen and Chadick, I stop to chat with the counterman: What happened to the building across the street? I ask. Gone, he says. Took them all of a month to knock it down. What's going up? I ask. Something bigger, he says. Something fancy. Times Square is rising. Where did B&J go? I ask, fabric store par excellence, supplier to half the couture houses in the city, three floors and a crammed basement; iridescent velvets on the mezzanine; the place I got the black silk with a pattern of poisonous tree frogs. Gone, he says, far far away. How far? I ask sadly. 38th Street, he says.

My friend the architectural historian admires the gridded streets of Manhattan, as do I: the long open sweep of the avenues, the fretwork of the cross-streets like an open-weave textile, burlap or buckram. But I regret the dull utilitarian numbers. There may be magic in numbers, in lucky 7 or unlucky 13 or evil 666. But there is no magic in the lackluster name of a numbered street.

The old cities had streets named for their clusters of artisans and metiers. Later, these were renamed for illustrious men, famous battles, and the memories of lost buildings. But you will still find a via Paglieri in Verona, the street of the weavers of straw chair seats. And in Paris there is Quai des Orfèvres, the quay of the goldworkers, and rue d'Ormesson, the street of the weavers of a particular kind of Persian silk, from Hormuz. There is still a Porte des Poissonnières, the gate where the fishmongers sold their catch. Florence has still a via dei Calzaiuoli, the shoemakers' street, and a via degli Arrazieri, the street of the weavers of tapestries in the Arras style. London has still its Ironmonger Lane and Threadneedle Street and Edinburgh has Candlemaker Row and Leathermarket Street. Good, solid humble trades, these: belonging to the rustic mechanics and cobblers who furnished plain quotidian local goods to stout citizens and were such apt butts of Shakespeare's wicked wit: Quince the carpenter, Snug the joiner, Bottom the weaver, Flute the bellows-mender, Snout the tinker, Starveling the tailor. (Except those Parisian workers in gold and silk, who furnished luxuries to kings, glitter and flash.)

Venice never changed its street names, but then, Venice was never a plain city, and its artisans did not make sturdy sabots for peasants, but brocaded high-heeled clogs for ladies. There is a calle Saoneri in Venice, to be sure, soap-makers' street, since the wealthy of the world require to be clean. But the rest are names out of legend. Like Paris, Venice has its calle Orefici, goldworkers' street, and its calle Ormesini--where, in fact, the raw Hormuz silk was carried straight off the ship from Persia to be woven in the Oriental style. But it has also calle Perleri, the street where glass beads were made; calle Spezier, for the traders in spice; calle Specchieri, where the mirror-makers worked; calle Zucchero, where that precious rarity, sugar, was sold; and calle Zolfo, where one could buy sulfur. The arrow-makers were in the Frezzeria. Ponte dei Bareteri was the place to go if you wanted to visit your beret-maker. In calle del Vergola, one could purchase the silk cords to trim a gown, or a net of silk twist ornamented with beads or pearls for one's hair; and in calle del Parucchier one could buy the wig to go in it. Perhaps most precious of all was the commodity on sale in calle del Ochialer: glass lenses for spectacles, made of the incomparable polished clear Venetian glass, the best in Europe.

And when the streets were not named for the workshops in them, they were given names more puzzling: Blood Street, Passageway of Wicked Thoughts, Golden Arab Square, Nostalgia Bridge, Thoughts Street, Crazy Staircase Square, Alley of the Big Eye, Street of the Speaking Stones, Street of the Assassins, Broad Street of Proverbs, Bridge of Fists, Anatomy Court, Pardon Street, Miracle Square, Secondary Street of Orbs (Eyes), Two Swords Street, Bridge of Marvels, Bridge of Lousy Pay, Second Court of the Million (where Marco Polo lived), Turning Table Street (signifying a bank). And if all that weren't enough, there are Honest Woman Street and the Street of the Love of Friends. I am not making any of this up; in Venice every doorstep is a Portal to unseen worlds (glitter, glitter and flash).

We are poorer in New York, as every city is poorer than Venice. But behind our drab, prosaic numbered street names lie mysteries enough. I need not travel down to Mulberry Street to find whimsy, nor stand at the crossroads where Little West 12th Street confusingly traverses 4th Street to stand on charmed ground.

I am not buying cloth on 40th St. today, but this street too is a portal to an ancient past, for the cloth trade is as old as civilization, and the great port cities--of which New York is only the youngest--were built upon the strange human passion for pretty drapery.

I am not here to buy cloth: I've come to 40th Street because the Drama Book Shop is here. For we are on the lip of Times Square--the real Times Square, the one the tourists pass by all unconscious, awed as they are by the neon and the LED screens (glitter and flash). This is the Times Square of the Performers: the upstairs studios where dancers stretch at the barre and practice, famous and non, pro and amateur, cheek by jowl; the place that makes toe shoes and sells rosin and powdered chalk; the second-floor shops that sell Max Factor and Ben Nye professional makeup in plain numbered colors: Fair Male #1, Fair Male #2, Tan Male #1, Old Age #2, Negro #1. A few do have names (as a few streets in New York have names), but they would not sell well at Macy's: Cine Light Beige, Death Purple, Cadaver Grey, Sallow Green, Death Flesh Foundation, Death Straw Foundation. Pass them by today; the theater has always made a mockery of death, and death has always reciprocated.

There is no cat in the Drama Book Shop, but there is a red plush Victorian gilt sofa on the balcony, where you can sit and read Stoppard or Albee in slim, cheap little working paper editions from Samuel French, or a biography of Isadora Duncan, with pictures. I'm sorry, says the guy at the information desk. I think it's out of print. We haven't had it for 4 years. Where have you been? I don't know, I say. Last time I was here, there was a building across the street; now there's a hole. Yeah, he says without irony, that's been happening a lot lately. Why don't you try online?

But I don't want to try online. The book I am looking for is Jan Kott's The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition. It is a collection of erudite essays that lead the reader a merry dance through theater, the body, sex, death, chaos, and misrule. The title comes from A Midsummer-Night's Dream, when Nick Bottom (the weaver) wakens to find he has the head of an ass. "Bless thee, Bottom," says his startled friend Peter Quince, "thou art translated!" This is a fine book, one that deserves to be purchased in a shop with cash, not over a phone line with a string of vacuous numbers.

But never mind, because I have my pockets full of pearls: Three flutes, two photos of myself, one stub to redeem a mended jewel, a book called The Secret Life of Puppets (bought on a whim), and Stoppard's new trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, about Bakunin and Turgenev. Something sensational to read in the train, as Gwendolen Fairfax advises.

And so back downtown, back to work, back through the secret door, out of Arcadia ("scene--Athens, and a Wood near it") and onto the grid once more. Into the busy bright dust of a New York summer, glitter and flash, pollen and ash. Thus are we all translated, minute by minute, block by block, nobles and rustics together. For Midsummer is past, my friends, and this is high summer, which will not long endure.

Comments

[wintercreek]

Hi. You don't know me and I've never been to New York, but I stumbled on this post and just had to tell you how enthralling it was.

I literally said, "Whoa," aloud when I finished reading it. Your prose is marvelous.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I've never been to New York, but

Well, that made my day. Thank you. So, come to New York already. Here it is.

[wintercreek]

I am a poor undergrad, but I'm working on it!

[tipgardner.livejournal.com]

This post is lovely, lyrical, powerful and absorbing, Malz. Your erudition seems to combine well in the bubbling cauldron of poetry, prose, passion and memories. Yes, memories, as you are one of the Keepers of such things. One of those in possession of the keys to vaults, libraries, chambers, towers and dungeons. You hold in your eye a universe of the past, an expanse of the present a light guiding the future. Your memory palace surpasses that of princes, queens, empresses and wise men.

Thank you for holding my, enraptured, at a screen for moments that flew with the space and pace of your steps across the grid of this, our fair City. Thank you for writing the brilliant prose that you put to LJ. Thank you for sharing such glitter and flash and sturdy hardwood and metals that will last.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

You are always so complimentary--thank you.

[tipgardner.livejournal.com]

Only when a writer deserves it. I saved this post to my computer. I hope you don't mind. It's such a great description of the City and of the passing of time that I want to be able to read it every so often as I look out on the grid of numbered streets and let my inner eye flow along to the magickal portals.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Thank you for taking me out of the dreary round of things for a few minutes. :)