Derive 1
February 18, 2018, by Ali
You would think that doing a derive on Valentine’s Day would give you a first hand view on love in New York City, but you’d be wrong. Perhaps it was cause I spent most of my time in Chinatown and the Chinese have their own Valentine’s Day, the Qixi festival, but it really felt like every other day in New York with maybe slightly more traffic around the flowers. However, Chinese New Year was only two days away so the flowers could’ve easily been for that instead. But as I think about it now, it’s probably better that it felt like a normal day. That makes it more real, less special, which is what I think you intended for us.
I started out at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, but I think the most interesting part of my route was the time I spent on Mulberry Street. I started out by Columbus Park, which was once the site of Collect Pond. Collect Pond was Manhattan’s largest body of water at the time, but by the mid-eighteenth century “it was nearly fished out…and began to fill with refuse (Sante).” The pond was eventually drained and filled in, and went on to become the center of the Five Points neighborhood, “the city’s first slum (Sante)”.
On the southeast corner of what is now Columbus Park sat the Old Brewery, which served as a brewery from 1792 until 1837, “when it had become too rotted for industrial purposes (Sante).” The Old Brewery went on to become a boarding house of some sort, where people crowded in and squatted for weeks or possibly months at a time. It was a place of poverty and crime and “it may be doubted whether shelves and stools, let alone counterpanes, existed in the Old Brewery (Sante).”
The Old Brewery is long since gone, but opposite it on the northwest corner stands the Chen Dance Center. The Chen Dance Center was founded in 1979 and is dedicated to “serving the Asian-American community and the New York Dance Community (chendancecenter.org)”. While the area of Columbus Park was once a slum, today it is clean and lively, the center of Chinatown. People play soccer and cards and one woman was even singing. The Chen Dance Center reflects this as well, turning Columbus Park into a safe place of culture and entertainment, instead of the day where entertainment meant something that belonged in a Red Light District.
As I continued up Mulberry Street, I entered Little Italy and things changed. Chinese shops gave way to Italian restaurants but the buildings all still looked the same. The tenements have probably been there for 150 years or more, before there really was a settled Chinatown or Little Italy, and the homogeneousness of the tenements reminds us that New York has been around a long time before any of us and will be around a long time after we’re gone. Today, Little Italy is surrounded almost completely by Chinatown and one has to wonder what kind of tension that has caused.
In fact, I didn’t have to wonder. As I started my walk into Little Italy a white man stopped an Asian-American man, telling him about an encounter, presumably in Chinatown, with a group of people that I guess didn’t speak English. “How they’d even get past immigration like that?” the man asked him. Feeling awkward and upset, I didn’t stick around to hear the other man’s answer but I hope he told that guy off or at the very least walked away from him. I wonder what other kinds of tension and prejudice is being born into that area as demographics change.
Little Italy only lasted a couple blocks or so before I ended up turning onto Grand Street and was immediately back in Chinatown again. One thing that really struck me was how colorful the neighborhood is. Everything felt like it was more colorful in Chinatown and Little Italy than the rest of New York: the buildings, the signs, even the clothes on people’s backs seemed more colorful. There was also a very strong fish smell due to the amount of markets, which wasn’t quite as enjoyable as the bright colors for me. In a way it kind of felt like being in another country (obviously in this case China), but at the same time it didn’t feel like anywhere else but New York. I know that doesn’t make sense, but New York is full of contradictions like that.
I walked along Grand until I reached Sara D. Roosevelt park and headed up towards Delancey. Chinatown quickly turned into the Lower East Side, and the sketchy section of it. Any safety I had felt during the day in Chinatown and Little Italy was gone. There were less people on the streets and I always felt that when it comes to New York there’s safety in numbers. One woman even walked straight into me, almost knocking me over, without even an apology or stopping to look back.
I don’t know what it is about Delancey Street, perhaps it’s the proximity to the Williamsburg but there is something off and unsettling about it. If I was my grandmother, I’d probably say that it was the proximity to my ancestors, but my ancestors from the Lower East Side didn’t live off Delancey…and the majority of them settled in Brooklyn anyway. But yes, something about that area just really rubs me the wrong way so that’s where I choose to end my experience.
I had never really spent much time in Chinatown or Little Italy before. In the grand scheme of things, I had maybe spent two days combined there. So I’m really glad that I got the chance to spend time in that specific area, uninhibited, completely alone. That way, I got the chance to just be there and absorb. And I’m really, really glad I picked one of the warmer days.