CENTRAL PARK IN THE SNOW

“I may be a lifelong “downtowner”, but Central Park really is the most amazing and the most beautiful part of New York City”

— Moby

I’ll get back to that quote in a moment.

For the last several months of articles I’ve entertained rambling tangents, outright diatribes and made reference to things that have absolutely nothing to do with New York City nor frankly anything at all. All this, on a site that started as a place to document my no-phone, no-plan walks around the Five Boroughs.

On a recent snowy day with a rare open schedule, I wondered what to write about next. After weighing the pull of far-off neighborhoods in Queens and South Brooklyn, the origin story of this blog revisited me for the first time in a long time: going on impromptu subway trips and not looking up at which stations I’d passed until I felt bored and wanted to hop off.

I packed my paper MTA map in my coat, left my iPhone on my kitchen table and walked out into a pleasant 36 degree F sunny day in my neighborhood of Little Italy. Given that I’m spoiled more than most in regards to MTA access, I headed in the general direction of the nearest bundle of interwoven subway lines to be found in the immediate vicinity, this one being the area where Canal Street forms the southern border of SoHo and northern border of Chinatown and Tribeca. There are many such “bundles” across the MTA, as in areas where various train lines coalesce. There are the major ones, such as 42nd St - Times Square, Penn Station, Herald Square, Grand Central and Atlantic Terminal. Yet countless others exist, and these knots of bored tunnels and trains tend to be some of the best areas of NYC to observe the city in its purest, most unadulterated form. The whole of New York criss-crosses and folds back onto itself at these junctions.

Almost every train in the subway system crosses Canal St somewhere along its length, this given the fact that the road cuts perpendicularly across the whole of the island of Manhattan. If you go to the West Side both the A/C/E and 1/2/3 trains come through. In the middle, where I live, you’ll find Canal Street Station, where the central character in my favorite book I’ve read this year (Severance by Ling Ma), a Chinese American girl named Candance, transfers every morning on the way to her Midtown office at fictitious publisher Spectra during an epidemic-induced apocalypse.

I walked into the station, finding myself presented with three colored options:

Yellow

Brown

Green

Now it’d be more fun if I hadn’t already memorized the majority of the system and picked based on color with no sense of where they’d head. For those not familiar, no one calls the lines by their colors, and the colors signify groupings of several lines that for some lengths share the same tracks (usually within Manhattan) before splaying off. If you feel so inclined, you can dive even deeper into the history of why this is on Wikipedia or the MTA’s site, but essentially it’s a relic from when multiple private companies ran competing networks throughout the city (with each color roughly but imperfectly corresponding to a former company’s domain).

I was at first feeling yellow. After all, it’s the N/Q/R/W trains with which I have the least familiarity. I can’t think of a single time someone said “I’m taking the W”, though perhaps it’s my fault I have so few friends in Astoria. I whipped out my MTA card, slipped it through the turnstile card reader and walked in its general direction (yes I’m aware of OMNI pay and have it, still trying to use open some leftover cash on these final cards though). Just as I’d made up my mind, the very “point” of my escapades came to mind again and I felt that I had broken my one home-brewed theological tenet of rail pilgrimage:

I’d planned.

True, the premeditation had only occurred several minutes prior to my arrival at the edge of the platform. And yet, the Boolean script on my own innocence printed false. I made the call to go to Astoria while still on the sidewalk above ground on Canal. This may sound like no foul, but the true joy of the process, at least for me, is the mystery of taking the first train to arrive.

I listened. At first, a clank. Then, a hiss, and last a long, monotone drone. A train was arriving, this time on the 4/5/6 tracks.

Shit. I know the 4/5/6 like the back of my hand, I thought. It had become my second love affair in the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a line to which I’d remarried after a messy divorce from a polyamorous three-way with the A/C and G trains back in Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill. Sometimes I still think about them. It’s a sexy line after all though, the verdurous 6...taking you past everything from the Brooklyn Museum to the East Village and onward, all the way to NYC’s largest park in Pelham Bay.

My now-life-partner, the 6 train, pulled up. Wanting to be a purist in an art for which I myself made and bent the rules, I stepped into a car on the Uptown side.

I mulled over the options, only to remind myself again and again that premeditation is a cardinal sin in train wandery. I huddled back into my book, Jasper Fforde’s Early Riser, hoping to forget to check the stops as we moved along in the cardinal direction of Manhattan North (when you’re a city with an ego as large as your bulging population, you’re afforded your own compass directions).

A sudden tidal bore of tourists into the car (who I’ll imagine were from North Dakota given their ample RealTree attire and halfway-between-Minnesotan-and-Canadian accents) suggested that we’d stopped at Grand Central. I kept my head down, pouring back into the book. It worked. Soon enough I heard a call over the loudspeaker confirming I’d spaced out long enough to induce a spatio-mental tangent (a term I’ve dreamt up for times when mental tangents yield physical tangents...I’ve been known to drive 25 miles beyond my intended destination despite being a cartographer).

“103rd Street. This is an Uptown 6 train. Next stop, 110th street”

I popped up. A station I hadn’t been to before! Rushing out of the train, I cross-referenced my mental MTA map and knew I’d be landing somewhere in East Harlem.

Harlem, it must be understood, is not one neighborhood. Like other large neighborhoods in NYC (think Bed-Stuy, Greenwich Village, Jamaica, etc), it’s a world unto itself with many sub-neighborhoods contained within it. In fact, I wrote an article a while back about a neighborhood within a neighborhood within a neighborhood: Harlem > Hamilton Heights > Sugar Hill. Like a Matryoshka doll.

This is not an article about Harlem, however. In fact, it’s no proper article at all. In touch with the above stated founding ethos, I really just wanted to shoot a roll of film. I shot some random buildings in the area, finding that there was a surprising number of brownstones and more older buildings than I’d expected. I found my way into a random deli and ordered one of the better cubanos I’ve had in recent memory.

I sat down on the sidewalk and ate it with my Chelsea-booted feet submerged into an opaque puddle, like one would in the soaking tubs of a concerningly underpriced pedicure joint in Sunset Park, still in denial around the idea that my Docs make me look like every other white 30 something NPR listener from 110th Street to Park Slope who spends his free time frequenting Cafe Erzulie to validate his own authenticity (which, mind you, is indeed one of my favorites…I even bought their shorts, two pairs, yes, cafes in New York go so hard that they put out their own shop shorts, you can’t flex on that, you, you, you provincial meaningless underling cities of the world who read these articles in the dark when no one’s watching, hoping the rest of us don’t notice that you envy the Xanaduian grandeur of the Parises, the New Yorks, the Tokyos, you…aight I’m done here)

That old spirit returned once more. This is New York. Eating 1,400 calorie sandwiches with globular limbs of melted cheese spewing out from underneath the bread like Oscar the Grouch’s arms from a trashcan not too dissimilar from the one sitting beside me on a random curb in a neighborhood you’ve likely never known. What can I say….I love trash. Listening to Dominicans and nuevoriqueños talk shit in Spanish and blast salsa on blown-out subs in the very neighborhood in which the genre was invented. Trash, rats, and a burnt sienna patina that crusts over all with which the city comes in contact...the brownstone slabs, the handrails of the subway stairs, the dull nimbostrati cementing out the Su on a muggy day. Somehow, the worst colors in the crayon box were all that was left and the gods still drafted the most beautiful city in the world with them.

New York City, my home. The live version of a Hey Arnold episode. The place that I want to be on my best and worst days.

There’s nowhere like it.

I snapped out of my self-aggrandizement narration, noting the Sun drifting a bit lower, though clouds prevented any exactitude as to the centroid of this lackluster light’s origin point.

With almost everything above Houston St behaving in accordance with New York’s famed grid system, I knew despite never having been to this part of Harlem that I was only a couple blocks from the park. The section of Central Park to be found around its northeast corner is one of my favorites. Home to the Harlem Meer, a beautiful pond that freezes over in winter and can be fished in summer, the Northern section of the park is largely tourist-free. I think it’s prettier, too. If you’ve got a penchant for less manicured parks, the wild-like forests of the North Woods cradle streams and waterfalls through deep ravines laden with equal parts birds and birders.

For those wishing to recreate the journey, I cut across the northern section along the southern shore of the Harlem Meer and then diagonally downwards in a southwesterly direction from the Woods. Downwards is perhaps misleading as much of this takes you uphill. Yes there are hills in New York, many in fact rivaling hills of San Francisco (see my post on Highbridge in The Bronx for photo evidence).

I find myself returning to this slice of the City often. It’s one of those places that’s hard to ruin: it hides in plain sight, or rather doesn’t hide at all, succeeding in providing tranquility and respite simply by virtue of being a tad harder to get to from the tourists throngs of Midtown than the rest of the world’s most visited park/

I know; this blog tends to lean in favor of the harder to reach slices (and just slices in general, especially upside downs) of NYC. The romance of gritty backstreets and city noir nightscapes endures and is very much a real thing. Go deep on an MTA line you don’t know and you’ll stumble into entire worlds. If one of Brooklyn’s most famous residents could speak on behalf on the great city of New York, he’d not to me and my contradictins, and in noting his own, say he’s large, that he contains multitudes.

And yet there are times when we hurl away in a giant metal sequence of rolling stock in the exact opposite direction of our home, only to drive deeper into The Self.

We emerge into places we’ve known all along to see it yet again anew. The waxing away of the overcast drear, the Blue Paper of the sky above. As another famous Brooklynite once said,

“It was all a dream”.

But it wasn’t just a dream.

It was Central Park. Thee Central Park.

That special, un-ruinable Heaven that shines in all weather, beckoning even the heartiest of downtowners to venture north of 14th Street…

asking each of the 9 million of us to journey inward, to the city’s blooming heart,

to heed the cadenced calls of the Homeward Angel.