Month: August 2023

A moment of respite before the helicopters intrude. I started a peaceful Sunday morning with coffee and stretching in the garden. Then a tennis lesson at the Central Park courts.

There’s nothing as gratifying as being a beginner at something. Your learning is visible – like filling up a knapsack of new words or gestures or sounds. Whatever it is your learning. The changes are visible. Yesterday you didn’t know this word and now you do. Learning to count to ten in Swahili. Or the joy of learning the word “kipepeo,” which means “butterfly” in Swahili. Today it was learning to serve. How to toss the ball with a straight left arm, how to stop trying to be fancy and just get it inside the lines.

Learning to play tennis reminds me of the early years learning classical guitar. There was a moment when I started making a full, round and resonant sound. My teacher at the time – Steve – said something to the effect of “now that you’ve done it, you know you can do it. So you own it.” And hour after hour of practicing, I’d get it right. The sense memory begins in retrospect. You knew it felt better and sounded better and you try to remember how your fingers felt.

Same in tennis. Or so it seems to me, two months into my new obsession. You get it right – wrist relaxed, not gripping the racket, just easy – the full swing, left hand guiding the ball into your strings. And you start to recognize the feel of it until stroke after stroke you can just let it happen.

After my lesson, I went to practice against the backboard near the pickle ball courts. I was the only one there until some kid rode right onto the court on his electric bike, music blaring. Ugh. In the 80s we fought the boom boxes, and now they’re back. COVID seemed to have marked the end of manners, civility, adherence to any social norms. I asked him to use earphones. He said he didn’t have them and it’s a public place so he can do what he wants.

Got pretty much the same response to the FAA when I wrote them to complain about the hundreds of helicopter flights that now plague those of us who live between the Hudson River and Central Park. Their response was that I live less than half a mile from two main helicopter routes, as if the routes evolved with the schist outcroppings. They said helicopters fly over the park to avoid interfering with other aircraft.

But no, helicopter fly over Central Park so rich assholes can take the most cliched picture of the park.

I’m just saying.

For decades, the old mansion has stood empty. Looming there on the corner of West 85th Street and Central Park West, its ground floor windows blurred out by brown paper and painter’s tape. A sign on the basement window warns politely that all who venture near are on camera. But the people who venture near, enter and exit, smoke and sip coffee while leaning on the dark red walls – they’re all laborers.

Who lives there?

Rumor has it that there’s a swimming pool in the basement. For a while it was a rooming house. There was a fire once, the old timers say. When the parlor floor window shades are up, you can see the intricate stained glass detail and mahogany paneled walls. One Christmas, the front window – the one facing the park – was unshaded, and someone had installed a giant Christmas tree.

Still no people seem to live there.

Yesterday the workers vacuumed the sidewalk. A couple of years ago they dug up the sidewalk to install heaters to melt the winter ice.

Curiosity got to me. Here’s what I found online. Thanks to a blog by Tom Miller. An architect, Edward Angell, and a developer, William Noble, built the old mansion on spec. Back in 1888, when the Upper West Side was being wrested from the residents of Seneca Village and Central Park was brand new, Noble got Angell to build these ornate brownstones facing the park. He built them on spec.

When I first moved to this block – in February 1997, the building was said to be a rooming house. Today, when I walked by on my way to the park, it looked pristine. And yet, it’s empty. Such a waste. And I wonder if the person who owns it has a big family that will one day bring life to the place, or if they’re going to turn it into a crazy expensive AirB&B.