Gone to New York Adventures in the City

by Frazier, Ian; Kincaid, Jamaica

• ISBN13: 9780312425043
• ISBN10: 031242504X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-08-22
• Publisher: Picador

Summary

Welcome to Ian Frazier''s New York, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who scaled the World Trade Center. Learn the location of Manhattan''s antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey. Like his literary forebears Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, Frazier makes us fall in love with America''s greatest city all over again. Ian Frazier is the author of Great Plains , The Fish '' s Eye , On the Rez , Family , as well as Coyote v. Acme and Dating Your Mom . A frequent contributor to The New Yorker , he lives in Montclair, New Jersey. Welcome to Ian Frazier''s New York, a city more downtown than up, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who climbed the World Trade Center, and an eighty-three-year-old typewriter repairman whose shop on Fulton Street has drawers full of umlauts. Learn the location of Manhattan''s antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey. Like his literary forbears Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, Frazier, in his inimitable voice, makes us fall in love with America''s greatest city all over again, the way he did, arriving as a young man from Hudson, Ohio. In evocations of the F train, Canal Street, and Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in his "Bags in Trees" essay, Frazier gives us New York again, in all its vital and human multiplicity. "These essays are classics of [the] genre . . . Throughout Frazier writes with such charm, such self-deprecating introspection, we wish that we . . . could claim him as a friend."'” The Boston Globe "One of the best writers in America. Absorbed by people and their stories, endlessly curious, graced with an exquisite ear for the way people speak, addicted to dry humor, and unpretentious, he has become a master craftsman in the odd and lovely art of collecting and telling stories of American life."'” The Oregonian "[A] pleasing, humorous, but also keenly trenchant collection . . . freely mix[es] the ugly with the sublime, and the scary with the fascinating and the funny . . . It''s also a lovely read."'” The Christian Science Monitor "A delight to follow on the page . . . And don''t let the emphasis on New York City fool you. Frazier is one of us."'” Chicago Sun-Times "This is New York on a human level. Frazier obviously likes people; his empathy comes through."'” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Generous slices of New York wry, from humorist/essayist Frazier. Though currently a New Jersey suburbanite, Frazier resided for years in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. In these 22 pieces from the Atlantic Monthly , Double Take , Mother Jones , Outside and The New Yorker , the native of Hudson, Ohio, celebrates Gotham as only a wide-eyed transplant could. The essays begin in 1975'”when the city teetered toward bankruptcy'”and end in 2005, when, post-9/11, Frazier wished that city residents would ''remain our hopeful, foolish selves while caught up, now inextricably, in the wider world.'' Like predecessors A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, he chronicles the manically funny. More often, he rejoices in the infinite idiosyncrasies encouraged by the city. Three essays describe his hobby of snagging bags out of trees'”a penchant so pronounced that his wife grew skeptical when he began bringing some bags home. In marvelous detail, he profiles George Wittig, who climbed the World Trade Center in 1977, as well as an octogenarian master of the lost art of manual-typewriter repair. Frazier even strings together graffiti in a reading room at Columbia University''s Butler Library into a hilarious casual essay. He is equally at home delivering a Whitmanesque hosanna to Brooklyn, a dissection of the groups riding the F Train and a chronicle of Canal Street, jammed with as much sound, character, incident and history as the colorful neighborhood itself. A vivid collection of essays expertly blending

Author Biography

Ian Frazier is the author of Great Plains, On the Rez, and Dating Your Mom, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Jamaica Kincaid	ix
Antipodes	3	(4)
Rental	7	(4)
Cops	11	(6)
Canal Street	17	(36)
Bumpin'n	53	(4)
Friend of the Building	57	(4)
Bags in Trees	61	(4)
To Mr. Winslow	65	(4)
Bags in Trees II	69	(4)
On the Floor	73	(4)
Summer Rules	77	(4)
Street Scene	81	(4)
In the Stacks	85	(4)
Take the F	89	(12)
All That Glitter	101	(4)
Someplace in Queens	105	(14)
Typewriter Man	119	(22)
Sink or Swim	141	(4)
The Mornings After	145	(6)
Bags in Trees: A Retrospective	151	(16)
Route 3	167	(18)
Out of Ohio	185

Excerpts

Gone to New York

ANTIPODES

If you drilled a hole straight through the earth, starting at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, you would pass through ten inches of pavement, four feet of pipes, thirty-five feet of Seventh Avenue subway, about twenty-two hundred miles of rock, about thirty-six hundred miles of nickel-iron core, and then another twenty-two hundred miles of rock. You would come out in the Indian Ocean, 106°3' east longitude and 40°45' south latitude, about three hundred miles off the southwest coast of Australia. You would have reached Manhattan's antipodes, or diametrically opposite point on the globe. You would be about two and a half miles under water.

Due north of Manhattan's antipodes, it is 2,040 miles to Malingping, Java. Due south, it is 1,500 miles to the Knox Coast of Antarctica, 2,260 miles to the Russian research station at Vostok, Antarctica, and 2,955 miles to the South Pole. Due west, it is 7,700 miles to Punta Rasa (Flat Point), Argentina. Due east, it is 1,760 miles to Cape Grim, Tasmania. The town nearest to Manhattan's antipodes is Augusta,Australia, 590 miles to the northeast, where Australians go for fishing vacations and where it rains about half the year.

Not much goes on in this part of the Indian Ocean. It is fall there now. The water is gray-green, like the North Atlantic, and very rough. Navigators call these latitudes "the roaring forties," because the storms are so violent. There are no shipping lanes near Manhattan's antipodes, so there is no junk on the ocean floor. The ocean floor is completely dark (except for the light produced by occasional luminescent fish and other organisms), and the water at the bottom is only a few degrees above freezing. A white, squishy substance known as globigerina ooze covers the ocean floor. Glob ooze, as oceanographers call it, is a calcium sediment made of the shells of globigerina, which are tiny foraminiferal organisms. Glob ooze can be anywhere from less than an inch to a thousand feet thick. Since it is too much trouble to wash the salt out of it even to make cement, glob ooze has no commercial value. This far from land, there are few fish. A school of whales might pass by seasonally. There might be a few rattails (bottom-feeders related to the shark family) near the ocean floor.

If you could walk northeast to Australia, wearing some kind of glob-ooze shoes to keep from sinking in, as well as equipment to deal with the problems of air, light, temperature, and water pressure, you would have to cross underwater mountains of sixty-four hundred feet and descend nineteen thousand feet into valleys before you ascended Australia's continental slope, nearly four hundred miles away. Manhattan's antipodes lies on the southeastern branch of the Mid-Indian Oceanic Ridge, which is a Y-shaped ridge inthe middle of the Indian Ocean with heights of ten thousand feet and valleys as deep as fourteen thousand feet. The Mid-Oceanic Ridge is the longest continuous feature on the earth's surface. Dr. Bruce Heezen, of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory (one of the few New Yorkers who have ever been close to Manhattan's antipodes), made the first detailed map of the Indian Ocean floor, under the auspices of the International Indian Ocean Expedition, in the early 1960s. He says that the discovery and exploration of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge provided the conclusive proof for the theory of continental drift. "About fifty million years ago, the ridge moved through Antarctica and chipped off a huge piece--Australia--which then headed north and rotated slightly counterclockwise until it crashed into Indonesia," he said. "It did not take long, in geological time. When we discovered that ridge, and when we found that the central and eastern Indian Ocean was much younger than the western Indian Ocean, the theory of continental drift was finally accepted. Before this discovery, if you believed in drift you couldn't get a job. Now if you don't you can't."

About the biggest thing that has ever happened near Manhattan's antipodes happened three hundred miles away, in the course of the International Indian Ocean Expedition. A British member of Parliament, on board the Australian shipDiamantina, was mapping the ocean floor with an echo sounder that was faulty--something he did not realize. About three hundred miles southwest of Australia, he and his shipmates started getting some extremely deep soundings. They became very excited about this and later claimedto the press that they had found the deepest point in the oceans. They named their find the Diamantina Trench. When their claim was investigated, it turned out to be wrong. The Diamantina Trench, even at its deepest point, is only about twenty-two thousand feet deep, which is considerably shallower than the deepest ocean trenches.

Two of our favorite Midwestern towns--Pekin, Illinois, and Canton, Illinois--were so named because their founders thought that the towns were exactly opposite the two famous Chinese cities. Pekin, Ill., and Canton, Ill., are in fact opposite points in the Indian Ocean some seven hundred miles to the west of New York's opposite point. Most of the United States is opposite the southern Indian Ocean. There is no point in the United States where, if you drilled straight through the earth, you would come out in China.

 

(1975)

GONE TO NEW YORK. Copyright © 2005 by Ian Frazier. Foreword copyright © 2005 by Jamaica Kincaid. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.