This Is the End of It All: A New York Holiday, Day 7

At long last, part 7 of 7 of a fantastic adventure in New York!

Our last day felt a bit truncated and abridged. We had an evening flight, and (if you can avoid it), I think it’s actually better to always leave on a morning flight so that you don’t have to worry about where to put your luggage during the day after you check out of wherever you’re staying. It was kinda icky, lugging it around as we went to see some final sights.

For our morning, we made our way to Russ and Daughters, but this time to their shop, not their cafe (which we went to for brunch on our third day). Their shop has on display in elegant and smart display cases their caviar, salmon, herring, cream cheeses, and an assortment of other items like fruits and nuts and other sweets. I ordered a bagel sandwich called the Super Heebster and it had whitefish and baked salmon salad with horseradish dill cream cheese and wasabi flying fish roe. It was just so, so good! After this, we made a quick side trip to Caffe Vita, where I picked up some coffee beans for my friends who were looking after my cats back in Minneapolis.

Our last two stops in the East Village before we made our way towards Harlem brought us to Avenue C, very nearly on the easternmost edge of the island, where we first had a look at C-Squat, mainly because I was interested in the building’s history with punk rock. I linked you to an article about what C-Squat is, but in short (and I’m essentially paraphrasing Annie Correal’s words), it’s a building that squatters moved into in the late 1980s. At the time it was an abandoned building, but they slowly fixed things up, turning a disused space into something useable again, and by the 1990s, the building was host to various basement punk shows.

The East Village has a colorful history of squatters, but sadly most of of them have been evicted. In the mid 2000s, however, the city and the squatters reached an agreement, and the squatters were allowed to stay and take ownership of the buildings, provided that they returned the buildings to code. Today, many artists and musicians live in C-Squat.

C-Squat itself is an unassuming red brick building that would pass unnoticed if it weren’t for a small sign that reads, “This Land Is Ours / See Co-op Squat / Not for Sale” in red and black stenciled typeface (and even then, the building still might go unnoticed, as the sign is quite small and unapologetically simple, and unless you’re specifically on a mission to see C-Squat, you would pass by it all together regardless).

Nearby C-Squat is the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, and as I indicated on our fifth day here, it was the second of only two museums we visited while in the city, the other being the wonderful Mmuseumm. But what museums they both were! Both are definitely worth a trip out of your way!

The MoRUS is a perfectly glorious museum that has exhibits about the city’s community gardens, squats, and people, all focused especially on the history of the Lower East Side. As I’ve said in other posts, I felt an especial affinity for this area of town, as it was a colorful celebration of people from all over, unpolished as to reveal the true nature of things and not prettied up in a kind of plastic facade.

And so as it was as we learned about Adam Purple at the MoRUS, a man who spearheaded community gardens in the Lower East Side with his Garden of Eden and who had just died in September of this year at 84 years old. From 1975 to 1980, he created a beautiful garden designed in concentric circles that provided a place for children to experience ground beneath their feet rather than concrete rubble, for people to grow food like corn, berries, and cucumbers, and for the community to generally have a safe space away from all the riffraff. At its height, it was 15,000 square feet large. (Again, the article I linked to above provides a nice overview of the garden, and I’m essentially paraphrasing Christopher Jobson’s words as I write about this.)

Sadly and unlike other parks, the city never recognized the Garden of Eden, the space always marked as vacant on maps. And on 8 January 1986, the whole garden was bulldozed in 75 minutes to make room for new buildings.

All of the MoRUS, however, paid a wonderful tribute to Adam Purple himself and the work he did. In addition to photos of the garden with placards offering information on the garden, we could even view one of his purple tie-dye outfits. The whole museum is quite colorfully designed (as befits such a vibrant history), with bright, bold paintings on the walls and staircases that detailed the timelines of community gardens.

As I said, try to make your way to the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space and send them some money, if you can.

We continued onwards, making our way ever farther north, stopping by the northern part of Central Park along Museum Mile (a stretch along 5th Avenue between 82nd and 104th Streets) where we saw the outside of the Guggenheim (it looks much smaller in person, its famous circular design of ever larger circumferences of four levels from bottom to top, like an upside-down pyramid except shaped into a cylinder) and enjoyed a walk along the east side of the running track that circles the Reservoir (a 40 foot deep body of water that houses a billion gallons of water and built in the 1860s as a temporary water supply for the city).

This part of town is very “cleaned up,” shall we say, and looks very expensive. That kind of aesthetic never really appeals to me, though, as I rather prefer the realness of the East Village or Chinatown or Harlem, where people from all over the world make there way about redbrick buildings that show their age.

Speaking of Harlem, our last stop in the city was in Harlem itself where we first enjoyed a pizza made in a wood burning oven at Babbalucci along with a Manhattan to drink, and then we had a short walk to the nearby Harlem Corner Social, where we enjoyed a drink called the Lychee Lii (Belvedere, Sake, Elderflower, Lychees).

It was at this point when we began to keenly feel the end of our time here, and it was very sad. I’m glad we got to experience Harlem, even if just for a very little bit, as I want to make sure to spend more time here when we return. It is bustling and vibrant and busy and full of lots of things to do. We happened to walk by the historic Apollo Theater as we navigated our way to the bus stop that would bring us back to the airport, and I would love to attend something there when we come back.

And one day, we shall come back!

Here are some final thoughts about our time:

1. Just for fun, here’s how I’d rank all the plays we attended, keeping in mind that the play at sixth place is only at sixth place because we only saw six things, and so therefore, if we saw 100 things, it still wouldn’t be deserving of 100th place.
   1. Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes: The Daisy Theatre
   2. Daphne Rubin-Vega and the Labyrinth Theatre Company: Empanada Loca
   3. Third Rail Projects at Kingsland Ward in Brooklyn: Then She Fell
   4. Elevator Repair Service and the New York Theatre Workshop: Fondly, Collette Richland
   5. Daryl Roth Theatre: Fuerza Bruta
   6. Punchdrunk: Sleep No More
2. I did rather enjoy New York City, but it hasn’t displaced London as my favorite city in the world. While London isn’t perfect (New York far surpasses London in terms of diversity of excellent cuisine, for example), London is easier to navigate (I mean, we used old fashioned paper maps while we were there instead of iPhones and didn’t get lost!), much more walkable, and denser in terms of how close so many fantastic things are in relation to each other.
3. I missed talking about some additional things that got lost in my notes on our time here:
   1. Somewhere along our journeys, we enjoyed Big Gay Ice Cream where you can order such colorfully named creations like the Salty Pimp or the Bea Arthur.
   2. We also happened across J. Kathleen White’s peephole dioramas, installed along the fence along the Ninth Street Community Garden, where you can view whimsical scenes of rabbits and other animals in small dioramas that you view through, obviously, a small peephole.
   3. We did happen to stumble across the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street by accident. I’m glad we did, because now I can say I saw it, but I never have to see it ever again (much like how I can say I’ve been to New Jersey by nature of how the Staten Island Ferry crosses into New Jersey waters for a bit, and now I never have to go out of my way to go to New Jersey just to say I’ve been there).