New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 by Teresa Carpenter

Took the #7 train to Flushing last week. You can’t miss it. It’s the final stop. Main Street looks and feels like Singapore. This should come as no surprise when you realize that Flushing is Greater New York’s bustling Little Asia. Cool. But on that particular evening I was in more of a 17th century Quaker frame of mind.

The Queens Historical Society in Flushing had invited me to speak about New York Diaries at their May meeting. So after a few anxious moments checking street numbers on acupuncture clinics and karaoke bars, I finally located (with assistance of husband’s smart-phone GPS) a verdant park and two old buildings; one of these, the Kingsland Homestead, the Society’s headquarters.

I had been looking forward to this particular engagement because I’d felt, during previous readings, that I’d given short shrift to one of my earliest diarists, a very brave man named John Bowne. In the 1600s, he and his wife had converted to Quakerism and come to live at the settlement that was then called “Vlishing.”

The Dutch West India Company’s charter laid out what served as Colonial law and seemed to grant religious freedom to all comers, but Governor Peter Stuyvesant, a notorious bigot, declined to allow The Friends freedom of assembly. A number of them signed a petition called the Flushing Remonstrance protesting that these rights had been promised them and Stuyvesant dismissed their grievances.

Defying the Governor, John Bowne allowed the Quakers to assemble in his home. And, for this, he was arrested, taken from his sick family, and deported to Holland. There, he presented his case to Stuyvesant’s employers at Company headquarters. Remarkably, his argument prevailed. When word of this reached New Netherland, the Governor was forced to stand down.

As I read aloud Bowne’s diary account of his arrest, my husband, who was in the audience, appeared utterly absorbed – not by me, but by something beyond the podium and beyond my right shoulder, out of a window.

Afterwards, I asked him what he’d been looking at. Turns out, it was the old Bowne manse, site of the first test of religious freedom in the New World. And Bowne’s words, read in the shadow of his own house, had seemed, in my husband’s words, “magical.”

Note: The Dutch West India Company knew that religious tolerance was very good for commerce. It also left them on the right side of history.

Randy Cohen is a very funny man. A former gag writer for Letterman and  Rosie O’Donnell, he wore a para-judicial robe for many years as the New York Times Magazine’s venerable Ethicist. New York Diaries was lucky to include not just one but two of his personae, the Randy Cohen we know from his online journal entries for Slate,  as well as those penned under a secret  identity granted him by a TV ratings giant. He graciously agreed to forego anonymity and he appears in this volume as the “Nielsen Family.”

Randy now has a new gig hosting Person Place Thing, an original NPR production where personalities expound upon their favorites in each category. Recent guest, author and raconteur, David Rakoff, produced a hands-free can opener  with which he proceeded to open a  tin of cigarello-thin cream-filled cannoli. (See above.) Who knew a kitchen appliance to be imbued with mystical significance?

The can was then passed around the crowd. When it reached my husband and me we discovered that preceding congregants had been reluctant to open the vacuum-packed seal for fear of making a sound. We had not had dinner, and if you were listening to the broadcast and heard a sharp, aluminum “pop’, that was us. We are Huns.

Check out personplacething.org

Hats, dozens of them — some demure, some risqué, all gorgeous and frequently constructed in apparent defiance of the laws of physics – are on display at the Bard Graduate Center [for] Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material at 18 West 86th Street.

This unusual exhibit came about as a collaboration between The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British milliner Stephen Jones That’s “Sir Stephen,” I believe, as there is a video of him being knighted by Prince Charles and he Sir Stephen) seems to maintain a giddy sense of humor about the thing. Fortunately, that spirit of whimsy informs this collection.

There are hats decked with swans, ballet slippers, boxes of household products, one with a couple of straw figures copulating. Oddities such as Andy Warhol’s wig (natural and synthetic hair) and FDR’s top hat crop up. There is one intriguing cultural number, the Veil Hat, composed of a hoop, not a brim, from which a semi-opaque black veil falls well below the bosom. It comes with a slit from which a delicate hand can presumably extend. And do what? Does this comply with Sharia Law?

My favorite was a number made for actress Sarah Jessica Parker to wear at her the London opening of “Sex and the City” in 2009. It is a confabulation of peacock feathers, silk flowers and hand-painted chicken and turkey feathers got up as butterflies — all giving the impression of sporting a plot of rain forest. (She wore it to the premier. and it photographed beautifully.)

Of Jones’s own creations, I favored the hat in the shape of a painter’s palette. And his work pictured in the photo above, the Silk Twist Hat (Hats: An Anthology II) reminded me of a description given by the diarist Maria Lydig Daly of the elaborate hairdressing of New York Society of the 1800s: Her entry of January 20, 1863.

One lady, a Mrs. Ronaldi, who is now the toast of the town, wears a bird’s nest with eggs, making her head a hatchery. I doubt if there is enough brain there to hatch anything.

New York Diaries: 1609-2009. p. 12

Saw a remarkable performance this weekend past. A young playwright, Krystal Banzon, performed her own short work at The Living Theater, 21 Clinton Street. Lower East Side. Her protagonist plays an applicant seeking a job at a high-powered corporation (of unspecified purpose or function.) She does her high-stakes song and dance while fighting down a panic attack. Very effective portrayal of a young person who is hyper-educated, accomplished at everything, yet broke and desperate.

The Living Theater is a wonderful place for fledglings to try out their wings under tutelage of the legendary actress, director, producer Judith Malina. Judith also happens to be a gifted diarist with some of best-observed entries in my anthology. I refer you to her description of the Rosenbergs in their caskets (June 23, 1953) and the performance of an aging thespian who fights to keep his theater open in the face of financial ruin. (June 12, 1948.)

The Living Theater is currently presenting 30 days of plays by women through April 7. Check out Womencenterstage.org.

If you love maps, this exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York is pure Cartesian catnip. The Grid, of course, refers to our inexorable succession of parallel streets that city commissioners (read, developers) imposed upon Manhattan in 1811.

The message the exhibit sends is somewhat mixed. On one hand, we are asked to admire, as the introductory inscription suggests, the “human intervention and vigilant enforcement” that allowed the city to escape the fate of Lower Manhattan — meandering streets and, incidentally, a quaint and definable character. Inscribed on another wall, however, is a quote from a rueful Clement C. Moore, himself a developer, who described the task of leveling of the island.

“Nothing” he wrote, “is to be left unmolested that does not coincide with the Street Commissioners’ plummet and level. These are men who…would have cut [through] the seven hills of Rome.”

Although the planners envisioned the city running a rigorous east to west – all north/south traffic to be borne by the rivers – they were bested by the actual needs of a human population. Manhattanites lived uptown and went to work downtown, necessitating a widening of the vertical avenues. This had the happy effect of opening up the island’s interior, and the avenues — Broadway, Park, Madison, etc. — became far more famous than their numerical cross streets.

The exhibit’s run has been extended to July 5. Be sure to go mid-afternoon on weekdays. On weekends, it’s jammed.

An intriguing Q&A at Mid-Manhattan reading last night. Maybe questions so sharp because book has been out long enough for many of the audience to have to read it. One question I’d never gotten before. “Was there anyone who kept a diary with the express intent that someone special would find it and read it?” Actually, yes. The artist/illustrator John Sloan kept a diary for the benefit of his wife, Dolly. She suffered from alcoholism and low esteem. He wanted her to read his entries so that she would know how much she meant to him. They had reputedly met in a house of prostitution. Good marriages come from the strangest unions.

Source: NYTimes.com - Photos: Moore: Rosenbach Museum and Library; Lerman: Stephen Pascal; Delaplaine: New York Public Library; British officer: New York Historical Society

Pages from the diaries of Marianne Moore, modernist poet; Leo Lerman, Condé Nast editor; an anonymous British officer serving during the Revolutionary War; and Joshua Delaplaine, a Quaker cabinetmaker in the 1700s.

Read more: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/new-york-diaries-in-the-authors-hand

http://www.boweryboogie.com/2012/01/teresa-carpenter-discusses-new-york-diaries-at-tenement-talks/