Tag: New York

last night, first morning

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Teetering down 8am street on flimsy heels,
the last-night party sequins clinging 
like spackled glitter to first-morning tatters,
passing among bodega owners sweeping out
the last night, 
the first morning
broken spectacles and trampled hats
emblazoned with the digits of the new year,
monumental on last-night billboards
now first-morning dross, no more than 
assigned numbers to be scrawled in 
checks and forms for the next 365.
The first morning.
The last night.
Brash eleventh-hour promises —
trumpeted on paper horns and traffic jamming
with jazzed yelps from the intoxicated chorus
— now sounding mundane and frail 
on the hiss of dawn’s cold blues.

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city leaves

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City leaves, keep their color 
long into Novembers, 
chartreuse and saffron hues 
still aflutter on the avenues
while country cousins 
dour and rust back home.

City leaves hold on 
into their Decembers,
clinging to brittle leases 
on reaches intended 
for short-term stays
well after they’ve 
crinkled brown 
trying not to 
snap
and
fall. 

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2020 hindsight: how restaurants saved new york

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On a warm August evening in 2020, Bob and I sat at a table on the uneven sidewalk outside Union Square Cafe (USC) for the first time since the pandemic began, watching the patchwork staff somehow making it work. USC’s new Chef Lena Ciardullo was back in her kitchen, but so was Chef Tom Allen from the Modern, who was serving as her sous chef until whenever his restaurant would reopen. Denez Moss, who’d left Manhatta to become the new general manager at USC only a month before lockdown, was pouring drinks, and Halle Murcek, now Guest Experience Manager for the entire restaurant group, was waiting tables. Together they managed just about everything at the front of the house (or should I say out in front of the house) with the skeleton crew they’d assembled.

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my new york manifesto

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I wrote the following comment on a friend’s LinkedIn post earlier this morning and then spent the rest of the day on the streets of my City:

I came to New York in 1989, met my husband within two weeks of both of us arriving for art school, and have called this amazing City home ever since — to the point that I cannot imagine living anywhere other than this tiny cluster of islands. The brief time we lived away from the City confirmed that, and we got ourselves right back here as quickly as we could.

I’ve watched the City change so much over the past 31 years, sometimes for the good, sometimes not. Lived here through 9/11, hurricanes and nor’easters, blackouts, financial slumps, service strikes, and now a pandemic, and watched a resilient community return time and again.

The real estate developers will tell you glass towers and shopping malls full of franchised boutiques are what make NYC better and better. But, to me those are what dumb it down, homogenize it, and make it too much like everywhere else in our strip-mall-paved world. And those glass towers and malls are most failing to do anything for the City through this pandemic.

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normalizing

Jim Kempster1 Comment

pronounsOn June 26, 2015, that historic day when the Supreme Court decided that same-sex marriage would be legal in all fifty of the United States, I sat on a bus stop bench near Macy’s on 34th Street waiting for Bob to come out of Sketchers. We had just finished meeting with the lawyer who was preparing closing documents for the sale of our apartment and Bob wanted to look at tennis shoes.

The mundane character of how we received the news was poignant. I was now granted the unfathomable freedom to marry the love of my life who was shoe shopping as I sat on a bench among the unaware Midtown tourists only a half a mile (but a world away) from the epicenter of the impromptu celebrations popping up outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.

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back to school

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1963
school picture, 1964

I have spent nearly my whole life either enrolled in a school or working for one.

So, August is always the beginning of a new year for me—the hours of anticipation, the new space full of new supplies, the fresh start, the fear of failing, the return to routine and assignments and work.

I’m resurfacing three of my essays that live in that back-to-school world and the anxieties of beginning again: