NYC Empty Storefronts: A Mini-Photo Essay

On Wednesday morning last week, hizzoner Mayor Mike Bloomberg gave a speech--ranted, you might say--about what was wrong with Washington, DC, and suggested ways to address the country's serious economic short-term and long-term problems. His solutions were predictable: not enough bipartisanship, not enough will to cut taxes for businesses, which are recording record profits these days, etc. Bloomberg went on to suggest that our third and current capital of the United States, Versailles-on-the-Potomac, whose leaders' main goal is self-preservation of the status quo, which is to say, plutocratic power and corporate dominance and influence, needed a shakeup, but really only a gentle one. Not from below, though--NOT THE RABBLE. But from above.

Above all, after the shake up, the same sorts of people in power, who had brought the country to its present state, should remain in power, and this week, after he had again declared his non-candidacy for the US Presidency, an office to which he could and not be elected, he and similarly minded plutocratic-focused, corporate-friendly, power-worshiping conservative Democrats and moderate-to-right-leaning Republicans labeled themselves the "No Labels" party, convened to chat, issued a proclamation that was pure mush, and addressed not a single one of the major problems facing the majority of American people. (For their emblem they also purloined an artist's graphic designs yet initially denied doing so, to top it off. And they won't reveal their funders. Not a good start by any measure.)

But that's not my point, really. My point is that one of the first things I thought about as Mayor Bloomberg was ragging on Washington was the economic state of the very city he is supposed to be leading. He was, let us not forget, re-elected to a third term he engineered through the City Council, which changed the term limits law in his favor, by a slender 50,600 vote margin over Bill Thompson. New York has 4-5 million eligible voters, so this was pretty slim.  Not only is New York facing the largest income gap of any major city in the country, and not only do only 25% of its young young black male residents have jobs, but the city itself appears, despite Bloomberg's official line, to be in as shaky shape as the country at large. I have seen it with my own eyes.

The other day, as I went to New York to pick up a piece of hardware from the Apple Store on 14th Street, I began to note, once again, between my entrypoint into the city, at lower Christopher Street and far West 14th Street where the Apple palace is, how many storefronts were again empty, redolent to me not of the economically listless period in New York of the late 1980s or even of the early 1990s, but of that horrifying moment right after 9/11, when a cataclysm struck, businesses closed, people C and I knew fled (one friend told me he simply could not live in NYC any longer, and was gone shortly thereafter), and it was unclear what was going to happen next.

I decided to snap shots of all these empty store fronts, going farther, up into Chelsea, which despite its A-listers, endlessly sprouting luxury condo towers, and chic boutiques, is also not as economically healthy as hizzoner would like the world to believe.  Of course Mayor Bloomberg will not be reading this blog and couldn't give a flying you-know-what about what I have to say, but some J's Theater readers will recognize in these images their own cities, towns and suburban areas, and ask, perhaps already knowing the answer, why are the people in power so seemingly oblivious to this, and so fixated only one thing, which is reducing their top marginal federal tax rates, and those of businesses, despite the fact that they are taking home an increasing share of the economic pie and getting richer by the day as a result of the policies now in place?

This was the first empty storefront I spotted. I remember going into this place from time to time when it was a deli-corner store. They never had my favorite date bars, but it was okay in a pinch. Then it became a clothing boutique geared towards the wealthy, and now....

This place holds sentimental value for me, because I copied many a poem, short story, whole sections of Seismosis, papers for NYU, etc., here. And now look at it.

This was a restaurant, I think, then a boutique of sorts. I think; I can't remember.

This was a too-pricey Portuguese restaurant, Alfama, where my friend Arthur and I had a meal. When I went to order some wine, the word for cup (copa!) slipped completely from my memory.

A restaurant, no longer.

I can't recall what was here; it appears it was a restaurant.

A Thai restaurant was here for years. I went there once when I was in school. Not great but not bad. Inexpensive, always a godsend to students and working people.

Not sure what was here, but when I peered through the pane I spotted beautiful wood paneling and wainscotting, and a sumptuous red leather-covered bench inside. A bar? A restaurant?

A bike shop, but no longer.

Two stores, just stones throws away from the Apple Store, what used to be the Meatpacking District and then the Rich People's Downtown district, and now...?

The twin storefront of the previous empty storefront

This was heading towards 6th Avenue. After a while it got so cold and I had errands to run that I stopped taking photos, but the name of this now defunct business stopped me. "Whynot"? Indeed.

And yet another.

At the end, before I got on my way, I took this self-portrait. I can attest that years in Chicago have weathered me well for New York's cold spells. Still, nothing will acclimate me to the signs of the city's--and country's--distress.

Graduation Day + Birthday + Adeus Saramago + Adios (Old New) New York

Although I've already congratulated this year's graduates, since today is GRADUATION DAY, let me extend my deepest CONGRATULATIONS again!

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Yesterday was my birthday. C made a delicious pasta dish (penne con funghi), and baked one of his signature desserts, a coconut-lemon cake, which, as the photo below shows, we dove right into. I'm willing to turn 45 weekly if it results in that meal and one of these cakes!

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Yesterday around the time that Reggie H. sent me the link I saw online that José Saramago (1922-2010) had passed. He was, without a doubt, one of the major writers in contemporary world literature, and one of Portugal's greatest novelists.  I must confess that although I can read Portuguese (to some extent), I've only read his novels in English; years ago, when after teaching myself the rudiments of Portuguese I realized I couldn't speak the language, so I engaged an Azorean tutor-conversationalist in Cambridge who had me read selections from the works of Fernando Namora, Jorge de Sena, José Cardoso Pires, Augustina Bessa-Luís, and several other major 20th century Portuguese (but never Brazilian) writers, including some whom she wasn't so fond of, like Antonio Lobo-Antunes. But Saramago was, I recall, "too difficult" for a beginner. By this, I later gathered as I read his work in English, his formally experimental prose, often comprising long, paratactic and sometimes hypotactic sentences, broken up mainly by commas and few periods, and shifting at times abruptly between points of view and perspectives, while interspersed with direct authorial commentary and philosophizing, certainly would have proved a challenge. Yet I've found that in English at least, Saramago's works, once you engage the prose's rhythms, aren't as narratively difficult in the way that William Faulkner's, Juan Goytisolo's, Claude Simon's, or  are. Nor are they philosophically demanding in the way that superficially more formally simple novels of Clarice Lispector are, or linguistically as impenetrable as Julián Ríos or João Guimarães Rosa (i.e., untranslatable). Saramago is very interested in the traditions not just of the novel but of storytelling, and stories, sometimes remarkable ones, often allegorical and symbolic, his novels do tell. Saramago attributed this deep devotion to story to his illiterate grandparents, great storytellers thesmselves, who reared him when his parents left the small Santarém district village of Azinhaga, where he was born, to look for work in Lisbon.



My introduction to Saramago's work was the 1995 novel Blindness (Ensaio sobre a Cergeza), which appeared in English (translated by Giovanni Pontiero) in the fall of 1997.  An allegory about the effects on civilization of man's loss of our most important and essential sense--sight--and the possibility, even after societal breakdown, of humanity, Blindness struck me at the time as the work of someone writing at the very height of his powers. The next year Saramago received the Nobel Prize, in part for this extraordinary book but also for his oeuvre, up to that point, consisting of the poetry he'd written during his fallow fiction period, of some 30 years, and the nearly dozen novels up to that point, including Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, Baltasar and Blimunda (Memorial do Convento), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. This last inventive, irreverantly anti-religious book sparked denunciation by the Roman Catholic Church, which led the Portuguese authorities to withdraw Saramago's name for a prize consideration, which thus led him to decamp for Lanzarote, in Spain, where he lived for the remainder of his life. From the time of his Nobel Prize he was sometimes derided as or viewed solely in terms of his affirmation of Communism, and he also received harsh criticism for his critique of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. His work, however, rarely dealt overtly with contemporary politics or ideology, either in the abstract or, in the case of Portugal's, where the Salazar dictatorship spanned a great portion of his life; only in one novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, I believe, does he directly treat a fairly recent political moment, 1936, when war and fascism were engulfing Europe--and Salazar seized control of the Portuguese state--but in his inimical, indirect fashion; the eponymous protagonist, Reis, is, in fact, a heteronym of Portugal's towering 20th century literary figure, Fernando Pessoa, whose death provokes Reis's return from Brazil and who makes repeated, ghostly and increasingly troubling appearances, finally leading to Reis's own "death," as it were, at the novel's end. Saramago has stated that this strange and enchanting book is his favorite.

The last book of Saramago's that I read was 2003's The Double (O Homen Duplicado), published in 2004 in English. A haunting metaphysical meditation, The Double starts with the principle of the doppelgänger, and plays it out, with devastating consequences, to its logical end. Saramago's prose style presents an initial challenge, but once you get past and into the flow of the storytelling, this bizarre tale unfolds like a charm: at the suggestion of a coworker, a man recognizes a double of himself in a videotape, conspires to meet the double, does do so while withholding the details and truth from his beloved, switches places with the man, terrible things ensue, and then...he's contacted by someone whose voice, as was the case with him and his double, sounds--in so much as he might appear--like his double. Only the protagonist decides he ought be preemptive this time around, and so.... This reductive plot summary hardly conveys the literary and philosophical richness of the novel, which, like several of Saramago's later works, unfolds on a more narratively abstract plane, giving it the quality of fable, or allegory, or myth. And there is enough in this work to ground the reader in a here-and-now, in a material world, swiftly but authoritatively drawn, full of suspense and disquiet, such that you not only become part of it, but care about these characters and feel the topsy-turvy emotions they experience.  This is the case not only for The Double, but for all the ones of Saramago's that I've read. He was, and remains, among the best.

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The blog of a mourner of lost New York City, or a fairly recent version. He has, however, tired of his mourning, and now bids his readers, like the now vanished city of a decade ago, adieu. Read it, and commiserate, and weep (if it resonates with you at all).  And to think, but for 50,000 or so more votes (only 1.15 million people voted out of 4+ million eligible voters), New York could have freed itself, at least for a term, of its neoliberal, billionaire billionaire-cheerleader.