Hof
July 1st, 2009, 12:02 AM
Who among us, while wandering the streets of New York, has not let loose our personal voyeur and looked up at the lighted, curtained windows of a stylish brownstone or at one of the glowing dots on a massive high-rise on a foggy night, and watched the people move around in their space and wondered what kind of lives were being played out just behind the glass ??
You KNOW what I mean because you've done it, too.
That experience-- to me anyway-- was one of the great, comfortable mysteries of living in ( or visiting) The City.
Once, while walking in the Pineapple district of Brooklyn Heights on an early summer evening, I heard from some nearby window the sonorously pinched chords of a clarinet playing a credible variation of an old Benny Goodman tune. I stood alone on the empty 18th Century street of cobbles and brownstones and fledgling baby trees and tried in vain to locate exactly which window it floated out of, and never finding it I lingered and had a great sidewalk concerto visit me-- something that, for a few minutes anyway, was a singularly beautiful New York Moment.
Until a truck full of hollow tubes and metallic scrap, marbles and macaws rattled by and drowned out the music. He stopped playing. I coulda plotzed.
Behind one of the dozens of windows, many of which were opened to the night's breeze, fine old music was being played, art was being formed and the life of some individual New Yorker had made itself known and was dominating all the disturbed sounds of The City for blocks around with his birdsound exercise. And just like that, *snap*, and he's gone. ...Which window???
At the East end of 51st Street, in a zone called Beekman Place, there is a near-hidden entrance to a footbridge that goes over the FDR and drops down to a sliver of a riverside park. It' s one of my favorite spots on the Island, and the view on the UN Building is priceless.
To get there, you have to walk very close to a Baroque Grand Dame of an apartment house, one with some very large parlor windows and smack on the river, then walk down some steep stone steps to the tiniest bridge that crosses the FDR, anywhere.
For years I would visit the little park, sometimes during the day when it was sunny, sometimes at night when it was fog-lonely. Always, the curtains to the grand apartment were drawn shut, entombing the place from the outsider. I'd look up from the bench along the East River and wonder why the owners would shut off such a marvelous view of the river and Roosevelt Island and Queens and the bridge that linked them all.
For nearly a decade, from '96 to '05, each time I passed it I'd become a slight bit more curious about Beekman Place and what lay behind those fine curtains. It was like stirring up a deja-vu.
One night in 2005, late and after partying in some Second Ave bars near the UN, three of us decided to go over to the little park and discuss Columbian agricultural products.
That night the curtains in the apartment were open wide, and the view of the stunning living room ( MUSIC room ??) beyond the glass stopped me in my tracks. As the others ran down the steps, urging me on, I stood and looked in at the flamboyantly private life of someone wealthy, someone who lived behind dense curtains in a million-dollar a month place; I drew in a deep breath of the secret room that was finally unveiled to me after ALL those years.
The room was large, mostly red and was bathed in a soft light. There were palm trees and bookcases down two sides, cozy sofas, sconces and art on the wall, and at the rear of the room was the largest Grand Piano allowed by law. It glistened black in the dimmed light, the polished wood absorbing the red and going almost to purple, like a humped and crouching panther in the twilight; the keys were its' teeth, and they seemed to grin and shine with a light of their own.
It seemed to me that the room was designed around the piano. It also seemed to me that it was a space for Popes or the various Dukes of Windsor. It was royal.
I was transfixed, in true reverence of such a room. It was a room I wanted to BE in, holding a Martini and asking the piano player in a slightly accented British if he knew any Billy Joel, and I stood forever and took it all in, another randomly sighted slice of a City I only get to read about from time to time but never actually see.
After awhile (mostly so I wouldn't be discovered by a cop and turned into a stalker) I moved on, ran down the dark stone steps and joined my friends, already in progress. I decided to NOT share my vision with them and when we climbed back up the steps and were back on the street again, the curtains were drawn and the room was dark.
I never saw it open again.
The Village has a hundred window stories-- the sound of Caruso floats over Thompson Street and you stand and wonder if it's real or if it's Memorex; behind blank walls of windows, people argue and whoop and shout out vile things in languages no one understands and it all pours like thin syrup out onto the street, the symphony of a thousand lives behind a thousand windows, some open to the world, some cloaked like monasteries.
There is the window with a slight odor of another joint, the bass jazz window of Miles Davis, the clank of dishes being washed near a window-- someone's playing violin at 2 AM, some are hammering on metal objects near windows, and around the corner old Clapton escapes in a muffled cloud from a basement flat, a place three steps down, securely barred like Riker's and curtained like the owner was trying to keep the Devil at bay and Slowhand in.
At night, especially in the crusty white of Winter, the citizens that made the city hum in Summer are sealed behind their glass. Their private lives gain indoor definition in Winter. They draw the curtains to keep in the heat, and you never hear from them until the first sixty-degree day comes around. You can only see their lights...
The mystery deepens in wintertime, it gets into your bones. The streets are quiet and the luminescense from behind the windows sends laser-sharp light shadows onto the dark street below; a dark form moves across the window and the movement makes the streetshadows bounce and wiggle in the snow-rutted grooves. The street comes alive.
Who lives there, and what do their lives really mean??? The windows seem steamy, the curtains cheap and droopy, the potted plants dried up and brown,no sound escapes, save for the thump of some speaker behind glass and brick somewhere--- and curtained off.
Who lives there???
My curiosity has never flagged.
Somewhere, behind all these tenament fronts, I'd speculate as I walked along streets both familiar and new, there is a room that outdoes the red room in opulence and taste. Somewhere in The Village, the land of a thousand windows, there is one that will stop me again, make me marvel at how someone designs their environment and then shuts it off from the world with a heavy curtain. I'll get a snapshot of their lives that I'll hold forever.
That's why I like to wander around New York and why I miss the place so terribly when years pass and I can't get back to visit again. The windows down here in Florida hold no mystery at all...
You KNOW what I mean because you've done it, too.
That experience-- to me anyway-- was one of the great, comfortable mysteries of living in ( or visiting) The City.
Once, while walking in the Pineapple district of Brooklyn Heights on an early summer evening, I heard from some nearby window the sonorously pinched chords of a clarinet playing a credible variation of an old Benny Goodman tune. I stood alone on the empty 18th Century street of cobbles and brownstones and fledgling baby trees and tried in vain to locate exactly which window it floated out of, and never finding it I lingered and had a great sidewalk concerto visit me-- something that, for a few minutes anyway, was a singularly beautiful New York Moment.
Until a truck full of hollow tubes and metallic scrap, marbles and macaws rattled by and drowned out the music. He stopped playing. I coulda plotzed.
Behind one of the dozens of windows, many of which were opened to the night's breeze, fine old music was being played, art was being formed and the life of some individual New Yorker had made itself known and was dominating all the disturbed sounds of The City for blocks around with his birdsound exercise. And just like that, *snap*, and he's gone. ...Which window???
At the East end of 51st Street, in a zone called Beekman Place, there is a near-hidden entrance to a footbridge that goes over the FDR and drops down to a sliver of a riverside park. It' s one of my favorite spots on the Island, and the view on the UN Building is priceless.
To get there, you have to walk very close to a Baroque Grand Dame of an apartment house, one with some very large parlor windows and smack on the river, then walk down some steep stone steps to the tiniest bridge that crosses the FDR, anywhere.
For years I would visit the little park, sometimes during the day when it was sunny, sometimes at night when it was fog-lonely. Always, the curtains to the grand apartment were drawn shut, entombing the place from the outsider. I'd look up from the bench along the East River and wonder why the owners would shut off such a marvelous view of the river and Roosevelt Island and Queens and the bridge that linked them all.
For nearly a decade, from '96 to '05, each time I passed it I'd become a slight bit more curious about Beekman Place and what lay behind those fine curtains. It was like stirring up a deja-vu.
One night in 2005, late and after partying in some Second Ave bars near the UN, three of us decided to go over to the little park and discuss Columbian agricultural products.
That night the curtains in the apartment were open wide, and the view of the stunning living room ( MUSIC room ??) beyond the glass stopped me in my tracks. As the others ran down the steps, urging me on, I stood and looked in at the flamboyantly private life of someone wealthy, someone who lived behind dense curtains in a million-dollar a month place; I drew in a deep breath of the secret room that was finally unveiled to me after ALL those years.
The room was large, mostly red and was bathed in a soft light. There were palm trees and bookcases down two sides, cozy sofas, sconces and art on the wall, and at the rear of the room was the largest Grand Piano allowed by law. It glistened black in the dimmed light, the polished wood absorbing the red and going almost to purple, like a humped and crouching panther in the twilight; the keys were its' teeth, and they seemed to grin and shine with a light of their own.
It seemed to me that the room was designed around the piano. It also seemed to me that it was a space for Popes or the various Dukes of Windsor. It was royal.
I was transfixed, in true reverence of such a room. It was a room I wanted to BE in, holding a Martini and asking the piano player in a slightly accented British if he knew any Billy Joel, and I stood forever and took it all in, another randomly sighted slice of a City I only get to read about from time to time but never actually see.
After awhile (mostly so I wouldn't be discovered by a cop and turned into a stalker) I moved on, ran down the dark stone steps and joined my friends, already in progress. I decided to NOT share my vision with them and when we climbed back up the steps and were back on the street again, the curtains were drawn and the room was dark.
I never saw it open again.
The Village has a hundred window stories-- the sound of Caruso floats over Thompson Street and you stand and wonder if it's real or if it's Memorex; behind blank walls of windows, people argue and whoop and shout out vile things in languages no one understands and it all pours like thin syrup out onto the street, the symphony of a thousand lives behind a thousand windows, some open to the world, some cloaked like monasteries.
There is the window with a slight odor of another joint, the bass jazz window of Miles Davis, the clank of dishes being washed near a window-- someone's playing violin at 2 AM, some are hammering on metal objects near windows, and around the corner old Clapton escapes in a muffled cloud from a basement flat, a place three steps down, securely barred like Riker's and curtained like the owner was trying to keep the Devil at bay and Slowhand in.
At night, especially in the crusty white of Winter, the citizens that made the city hum in Summer are sealed behind their glass. Their private lives gain indoor definition in Winter. They draw the curtains to keep in the heat, and you never hear from them until the first sixty-degree day comes around. You can only see their lights...
The mystery deepens in wintertime, it gets into your bones. The streets are quiet and the luminescense from behind the windows sends laser-sharp light shadows onto the dark street below; a dark form moves across the window and the movement makes the streetshadows bounce and wiggle in the snow-rutted grooves. The street comes alive.
Who lives there, and what do their lives really mean??? The windows seem steamy, the curtains cheap and droopy, the potted plants dried up and brown,no sound escapes, save for the thump of some speaker behind glass and brick somewhere--- and curtained off.
Who lives there???
My curiosity has never flagged.
Somewhere, behind all these tenament fronts, I'd speculate as I walked along streets both familiar and new, there is a room that outdoes the red room in opulence and taste. Somewhere in The Village, the land of a thousand windows, there is one that will stop me again, make me marvel at how someone designs their environment and then shuts it off from the world with a heavy curtain. I'll get a snapshot of their lives that I'll hold forever.
That's why I like to wander around New York and why I miss the place so terribly when years pass and I can't get back to visit again. The windows down here in Florida hold no mystery at all...