Anshul Dérive Two
March 22, 2018, by Anshul
Stereotypical understandings of New York City emphasize the hustle and the bustle of the city, its people scurrying across the network of roads and little alleyways on a never-ending list of errands. I found myself starting my dérive in a manner that I believed would be extremely at odds with these expectations of the city, as I was tasked with finding and sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. The park is a large and well-kept place that is welcoming to many families and seems to hold a significant level of prominence over the surrounding area. The fine weather on a Saturday afternoon has ensured that many people are out to enjoy the park’s offerings. Interestingly, despite a park traditionally being a place of rest where people go to enjoy respite from the day to day hustle of the city, the thing that truly caught my eye while I sat on the bench is the frenetic pace that the kids playing seemed to take on. For a little while, this little play area in the park seemed to be a microcosm of the city as a whole, with some people going from the end of the slide to climb back up to the top, others swinging back and forth on the swing. The background music to this constant repetition of actions was the squawking of an amazing number of pigeons. They too were pacing back forth, seemingly caught up in the millions of never-ending tasks that defined their lives. As I leaned back to take in the bigger picture, there seemed to be countless re-enactments of the same story all over the park, with the people walking their dogs around, and groups of elderly women pushing their carts along the path. Here and there, despite being at the park to rest and relax, there seemed to be an unmistakably urban characteristic to the way the city moves.
I chose to walk along the paths of the park until I reached the intersection between Avenue A and East 7th Street, the southwest corner of the park. My next instructions were to pick up a piece of litter, which had me walking north near the edge of the park. The thought of litter out on the streets is one that I would have liked to avoid but seemed to be an unavoidable aspect of the city. This made me think of two things in particular, the first thought being that of my own home city of Mumbai. Metropolitan cities and waste seem to go hand in hand, a tragedy that unavoidably accompanies the rapid transformation and growth that the city is forced to endure. This led me to think about Cliff’s “A Night at the Opera, and Another in Hell” which discussed the way that New York found itself “conspicuously, inescapably rich” (Cliff, 186) following an economic boom. Due to the developments of the time, people had more money than they knew what to do with and resorted to extravagant expenditures and an “avalanche of freshly minted money that […] chased the old plain ways into the shadows” (Cliff, 187). However, in conjunction with the extravagance that this rapid development promised, deep in shadows of the city was mass urban poverty in what would become New York’s slums. There would be litter, garbage, and waste that would accompany this transition, right along the streets of the city’s slums like Five Points, as people were forced to live and struggle as they sought a slice of the pie for themselves. The poignancy of the disparity between the extravagance and excess some gained from this development and the suffering and litter that the others were relegated to only found itself reaffirmed by the casino card that I managed to find on the street. To have picked up a piece of litter so symbolic of extravagance spoke volumes about the ebbs and flows of the city, of the currents that blew and influenced people back and forth along its streets. Furthermore, it showed how unavoidably tied together the economic success of some and the economic struggles of most caused by the city’s rapid expansion could be.
My wandering took me further into Tompkins Square Park, where I stumbled across the dog park which had the most number of dogs I have ever seen gathered in one place. There was something interesting about the dynamic of the place in that the place was one specifically focused on the social interaction between people, but also between the dogs being brought to the area. Right across from the area and the solution to the next task I was assigned to was Saint Emerick Church, a Hispanic mission style Catholic church that incorporated a school that serviced students from pre-K through to 12th grade. These two distinct areas held significantly different groups of people, but despite it being a Saturday, I could see that there was an interesting parallel between the social meeting function that both the church and park fulfilled. These quickly dredged up memories of the unique audiences assigned to the various theatres in George Foster’s “Theaters and Public Amusements”, which symbolizes the varied nature of the groups that make up the city’s population (Foster, 155-157). I walked south along Avenue B and was treated to a unique view of the city once I moved away from the vicinity of the park. Along the various intersections, I was treated to a distinct disparity between the residual, the dominant, and possibly the emergent, as there were aspects of architecture that seemed old but remained “active in the cultural process” next to and even housing some extremely hip and modern delis and stores (Williams, 122). The location had a bit of everything, ranging from old structures, a slight glimpse of the large tall buildings unique to the area that signified the start of the projects, hip new restaurants and delis, and continual hints of the better known less-offensive graffiti associated with the grungy lower east side. When looking back at this place I had to re-examine whether these older architectural structures and the somewhat run-down community garden that housed a statue of Lord Shiva qualified as “archaic”, but one could see that despite being somewhat older than most things in the area, they were considered significant contributors to its identity. The hip new locations and delis that were interspersed amongst these residual structures seemed to be mainly examples of aspects of city culture that had newly become dominant, as they were once emergent in the recent past but have become mainstream for New York. However, some of the concepts and locations that were on display seemed to thread that boundary of being truly alternative and emergent in society (Williams, 123).
As I approached the end of my dérive, I found myself crossing over the iconic Houston street. This acted as a natural border between the area I had previously described as an amalgamation of the residual, dominant, and the potentially emergent and a far more familiar version of NYC that was fully modernised. My final task was to search for something red, which caused my eyes to alight on the famous Katz deli, which I never had the opportunity to visit before today. Upon my approach to the overly crowded deli with the hopes of obtaining one of their famous pastrami sandwiches, I felt a sense of nostalgia that I could not explain. However, Whitehead’s words in “City Limits” may have hit the nail full on the head when describing what it was that I felt while staring at this iconic place I had never visited despite being in the city for so long. The process that he describes about “building your private New York” (Whitehead, 4) was one that I had been constantly doing since first coming here, but it was a process that had not yet ended for me. Seeing and experiencing that deli, much like my earlier experiences at the park, the church, and for the rest of my dérive only served to further develop and expand my own personal New York.
