Search Results for: New York Magazine

The Road to Asylum

As dawn arrives, Marfil Estrella looks out the window of the bus that will take her from San Salvador, El Salvador to Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photos by Danielle Villasana.

Alice Driver | Longreads | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,300 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“I want to finish elementary school.” — Karla Avelar, 40, founder of the Comcavis Trans Association, which advocates for LGBTI rights in El Salvador

* * *

“Women, don’t be deceived,” boomed the weary, yellow-eyed preacher, his sombrero tipped forward with a drama fitting for his bus-ride sermon, one that would last all the way from San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, to Guatemala City. As he made his way down the aisle of the bus, he stopped to touch women and girls on the head or the arm. “Don’t let men trick you,” he shouted, holding his bible up so high its well-worn pages brushed the roof of the bus. He didn’t touch Marfil Estrella Pérez Méndoza, 26, whose chosen name translates to Ivory Star. As she rested her round, hopeful face on the bus window, dark eyes peering out into the rainy grayness of early morning, the preacher passed by without laying a hand. “How do you say asylum in English?” she whispered.

Marfil Estrella was born in Cuscatlán, El Salvador, in a body that never felt like her own. She was assigned male at birth, and at 15, she came out as gay to her family. Their response was to disown her. “They told me that I brought shame on the family, that I should forget about them, and that I needed to leave,” explained Marfil Estrella. Like many members of the LGBTI community in El Salvador, her family forced her onto the street, and her schooling ended abruptly at ninth grade because she had no money to continue. She fled to San Salvador and slept in a park where she met other gay boys. “I saw a transsexual, and I said, ‘I want to be like her! I want to be like her!’” she recalled. She lived on the street, grew out her hair, and began to dress in women’s clothes, but she had no way to earn a living and consequently became very thin. Eventually she started to do sex work, one of the only options available to trans women in El Salvador to earn money. Read more…

Here Be Tigers

AP Photo/Rick Rycroft

Tasmania is a rugged, sparsely populated island off the southern coast of Australia. There’s a lot of bush and woods in which to disappear, or in this case, where a supposedly extinct species can cling to life. The last Tasmanian Tiger died in captivity in 1936, but thousands of people keep reporting tiger sightings across the country. For The New Yorker, journalist Brooke Jarvis spends time in Tasmania, examining the debate about whether this uniquely antipodal carnivore is extinct or alive, eking out its existence while avoiding scientific efforts to document it. What Jarvis finds is a species that represents colonizers’ remorse, the need for mystery in a world of diminishing scale, and one more expression of industrial society’s ruination of the earth.

The tiger mystifies Tasmanians. It’s a specter now, a myth. In the wider view, it’s part of a group of creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, yeti, and even moose some people claim to see in New Zealand, that live on the edges of not just town, but of human knowledge, what Jarvis calls “unverified animals living in unexpected places.”

Some of these mystery animals may be part of explicable migrations or relict populations—there are active, if marginal, debates about whether mountain lions have reappeared in Maine, and whether grizzlies have survived their elimination in Colorado—while others are said to be menagerie escapees. Australian fauna are reported abroad so often that there’s a name for the phenomenon: phantom kangaroos, which have been seen from Japan to the U.K. In some places (such as Hawaii, and an island in Loch Lomond), there are actual populations of imported wallabies. Elsewhere, the kangaroo in question was nine metres tall (New Zealand, 1831) or eschewed its usual vegetarian diet to kill and eat at least one German shepherd before disappearing (Tennessee, 1934).

What are we to make of these claims? One possible explanation is that many of us are so alienated from the natural world that we’re not well equipped to know what we’re seeing. Eric Guiler, a biologist known for his scholarship on thylacine history, was once asked to investigate a “monster” on Tasmania’s west coast, only to find a large piece of washed-up whale blubber. Mike Williams, who, with his partner, Rebecca Lang, wrote a book about the Australian big-cat phenomenon, told me that “people’s observational skills are fairly low,” a diplomatic way of explaining why someone can see a panther while looking at a house cat. In April, the New York Police Department responded to a 911 call about a tiger—presumably the Bengal, not the Tasmanian, kind—roaming the streets of Washington Heights. It turned out to be a large raccoon. Williams, who travels to Tasmania a few times a year to look for thylacines, described the continued sightings as “the most sane fringe phenomena.”

Another explanation is that the natural world is large and complicated, and that we’re still far from understanding it. (Tasmania got a lesson in this recently, when the government spent fifty million dollars to eradicate invasive foxes, a scourge of the native animals on the mainland, even though foxes were never proven to have made it to the island.) Many scientists believe that even now, in this age of environmental crisis and ever-increasing technological capability, more animals are discovered each year than go extinct, often dying off without us even realizing they lived. We have no way to define extinction—or existence—other than through the limits of our own perception. For many years, an animal was considered extinct a half century after the last confirmed sighting. The new standard, adopted in 1994, is that there should be “no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died,” leaving us to debate which doubts are reasonable. Because the death of a species is not a simple narrative unfolding conveniently before human eyes, it’s likely that at least some thylacines did survive beyond their official end at the Hobart Zoo, perhaps even for generations. A museum exhibit in the city now refers to the species as “functionally extinct”—no longer relevant to the ecosystem, regardless of the status of possible survivors.

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Jonathan Franzen’s “Readers”

Jonathan Franzen
Novelist/essayist Jonathan Franzen. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for The New Yorker)

“Most of the people who have complaints with me aren’t reading me,” says Jonathan Franzen, but he’s a process guy. He doesn’t read anything by his readers. They could write the book on reading him, but he wouldn’t read it and neither would they.

In The New York Times MagazineTaffy Brodesser-Akner profiles Franzen profiling his haters, who he’s fine with:

People can think something about you that isn’t true, and it isn’t necessarily your job to correct them. And if you do correct them, the corrections will eat up your entire life, and then where is your life? What did you do? You don’t have to answer criticism of yourself. You don’t even have to listen to it. You don’t have to fit your thoughts into sound bites just because of character limitations.

Has anyone considered that the interaction is the fragility? Has anyone considered that letting other people define how you fill your day and what they fill your head with — a passive, postmodern stream of other people’s thoughts — is the fragility?

Right at that minute, I wanted what he had so badly that I would have drunk his blood right there in the arboretum to get it.

Here is another thing about birds: They don’t care about people. They don’t interact with them, and yet they are totally accurate seismographs for people’s behavior. They reflect us without coming anywhere near us.

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The Inward Empire

(Sasha/Getty Images)
Christian Donlan | The Inward Empire | Little, Brown and Company | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,968 words)

I have never really liked the fact that I have a brain. The thought of it has always made me feel vulnerable and compromised and delicate, as if I am walking around with a glass of water balanced on my head, waiting for it to spill. And I now suspect that I am not entirely alone in this. When, recently, my daughter Leon first became aware of her own brain — when she first noticed the presence of her thoughts sounding inside her head — she assumed she was unwell.

One evening a few weeks back, I was drawn through the house by sudden sobbing. After I’d found Leon crying in the living room, and after I’d wiped her nose and pinned back her hair, she told me, with much floundering and fumbling to get the meaning out, that she had pictures stuck in her head and she didn’t know why. Read more…

La Otra

Getty / Sire Records / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jaquira Díaz | Longreads | June 2018 | 19 minutes (4,721 words)

1985. These were the days of Menudo and “We Are the World,” the year boxer Macho Camacho gave a press conference in a leopard-skin loincloth as Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” blared from radios across the United States. In one month, the space shuttle Challenger would explode while all of America watched on television, entire classrooms full of kids, everyone eager to witness the first teacher ever launched into space. My mother had just turned 22, and a week later Levy turned 8. By then, Mami had three children. She’d already been a mother for more than a third of her life.

In those days, Mami teased her blond hair like Madonna, traced her green eyes with blue eyeliner, applied several coats of black mascara, apple-red lipstick, and matching nail polish. She wore skin-tight jeans and always, no matter where she was going, high heels. She dusted her chest with talcum powder after a bath, lotioned her arms and legs, perfumed her body and her hair. My mother loved lotions, perfume, makeup, clothes, shoes. But really, these were just things to her. The truth was my mother loved and enjoyed her body. She walked around our apartment butt-ass naked. I was more used to seeing her naked body than my own. You should love your body, my mother taught me. A woman’s body was beautiful, no matter how big, how small, how old, how pregnant. This my mother firmly believed, and she would tell me over and over. As we got older, she would teach me and Alaina about masturbation, giving us detailed instructions about how to achieve orgasm. This, she said, was perfectly normal. Nothing to be ashamed of.

While my father only listened to salsa on vinyl, Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón and Ismael Rivera, my mother was all about Madonna. She was American, she liked to remind us, born in New York, and she loved everything American, including her music. She belted the lyrics to “Holiday” while shaving her legs in the shower, while making us egg salad sandwiches for lunch. She talked about moving us to Miami Beach, where most of our titis and Grandma Mercy lived, about making sure we learned English.
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How To Build An Intellectual

High schools girls smoking outside their school in New York City, 1989. (Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)

Hedia Anvar | Slice | Spring/Summer 2018 | 16 minutes (3,161 words)

On the day I constructed an intellectual from scratch, my mother, all high heels and tailored skirt, would’ve taken me to the supermarket with her. I wanted badly to go but hadn’t jumped to get ready, so she left while I was still in my underwear playing in the dirt.

We lived on the second floor of a two-story old-style complex in the Shemiran quarter of Tehran. My mother’s relatives occupied the unit below. We all shared the yard where I played. Their helpers, village women in colorful head wraps, used the yard to scrub clothes and pluck chicken feathers.

In the Tehran of 1970s, women in micro-minis walked alongside those wearing full hijab. If there was a cultural difference between a modern Iranian woman and a European one, it wasn’t exemplified by my mother with her crêpe de Chine style and mysterious — at least to preschooler me — social pursuits. The important click-clacking of her heels meant she had places to be. I wanted to be at those places with her, even the supermarket where I got to ride among the food in the cart, swinging happy feet toward her midsection.

I cherished my mother’s tummy even when her silk blouses covered it. Her stomach was the color of rice pudding. It was my father who dubbed her special complexion “rice.” Her eyes were green like ocean depths and a little dangerous, but her stomach was generous. She told me and my baby brother that we had come out of it and allowed us to knead it like dough for as long as we wanted.

The day she took off for the supermarket and left me in the yard, her voice reverberated down the stairway along with her fading steps. She was speaking to one of my uncles, and there was that word: intellectual. She pronounced it the French way, where “in” becomes “an.” In my language of Persian, “an” meant “shit.” So an an-te-lek-too-el sounded to me like something especially unpleasant.

Our yard had hard, damp soil, and between two trees yogurt drained in animal hide hanging like a hammock. I gathered twigs and clumps of earth. Then I yanked out handfuls of weed grass and found a sharp rock. I would finally figure out what an “intellectual” was because I was going to make one. I took all my soil, grass, and twigs to mash together with the rock. I kept crushing and grinding until I was left with a hairy, lumpy mass of misshapen brown, and I thought, There.

            That is an intellectual.

At almost 6 years old, I was used to being told I took after my father’s side of the family. My mother called them “artistic” and “intellectual” with enough contempt to bring substance to antelektooel before I ever constructed one out of grass and dirt.

A few years later, at the start of fourth grade, we moved to New York. Within a day of our arrival, a gust of wind in Midtown blew my mother’s skirt up in the air, but I missed it. I only caught a homeless man with a glossy face smiling and announcing, “I saw your panties.”

The four of us — my parents, my brother, and me — were waiting to cross an avenue overrun by fat checker cabs. A girl of 9, I was young enough that crossing the street brought me apprehension, but old enough for my parents to know better than to hold my hand, because who wanted to deal with the fury of an embarrassed kid? So I missed seeing my mother’s white hippie skirt, a remnant of the decade’s style, twirl above her head in a slow-motion dance — at least that’s how I would imagine it later.

She cocked her head brazenly at the homeless man, and with a Persian accent tinged with British, snickered, “Good for you.”

We were barely landed in the New York City of late-1970s crime and decrepitude, a point not lost on me, so I marveled at my mother, who was all of four-foot-eleven. My good-natured father was amused, as though both parties, his wife and the bum, were charming. My 5-year-old brother looked indignant and probably would’ve given up toys for good if it could have made that homeless man unsee his mother’s underwear.

We were heading to our hotel. The asphalt was very dark, and the lane lines bright white, which heightened the surreal quality of the city for me. We had taken leave of our country because my father, a theatrical director, had received a four-year grant to finish his doctorate at New York University — a happy accident removing us from Iran just before the fundamentalist regime took over.

New York, the greatest city in the world, had something set-like about it, not dissimilar to the sets in my father’s old productions. The buildings themselves were the unmistakable backdrops to the black-and-white Hollywood films I had watched throughout childhood in Tehran.

We slept in a gigantic king-size bed in our hotel room, the four of us in a row, jetlag waking us at four in the morning for several days. The hour was lonely and dark, so we took to turning on the TV and watching Tom and Jerry cartoons. My parents were grateful for the antics of the adorable mouse and foiled cat set to an excellent orchestra, while my brother and I didn’t want our sleep regulated because the pre-dawn ritual was an uncommon instance of solidarity for our family. My father would leave and bring back deli-hot bagels soaked with butter. Butter came to mean love and luxury for me.

When we settled into a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, rather than feeling excitement at having moved to famous New York City, I felt at attention and on edge. Learning a new language kept me in a constantly self-monitoring mode; communication was no longer second nature and had to be measured out. But I had always observed myself as if outside of my body, processing moments to transmit back fully editorialized. This activity simply multiplied once I was pried from the cozy, familiar reality of Iran and transplanted to New York.

My brother and I shared the bedroom while my parents partitioned the long living room for their own sleeping area. It felt like we were poor, but the smell of paint and parquet varnish gave the place an air of newness I associated with not being poor. “Poor” to me was the opposite of “new,” represented by frayed, faded slovenliness.

We had moved a couple of times before relocating to New York, and in our last home in Tehran, we each had our own bedroom in a modern, black-marble apartment. There, my father’s — rather than my mother’s — relatives had lived around us. His side of the family didn’t drain yogurt in animal hides or roll fruit into flat sheets outside to dry in the sun. They didn’t set up elaborate mosquito netting on the roof for sleeping in the summertime.

Sleeping on Tehran rooftops meant a mild smell of asphalt and glittering antenna branches lining the sky to the ends of the city. The nights were the blackest black and dusty with stars, balmy breezes hugging my body as I dozed next to my grandmother.

In the new, modern structure, even though my father’s relatives lived in identical apartments above and below us, I felt unprivileged compared to them. Mainly it was because they waxed their black-marble tiles to a reflective shine while ours remained dull and uncoated. This, I knew, must mean we were poor.

Although my mother wasn’t the homemaker type who’d entertain the notion of a waxing mop, we didn’t have a cleaning person either, while our relatives did. It was also the unironed, dingy collar of my school uniform — while the other girls’ collars were crisp and gleaming — that made me feel like an outsider in the private school I attended in Tehran.

I probably wouldn’t have had an inkling of poor or not-poor had my mother been good at “momming.” She, however, had little interest in most aspects of momming.

“How come you never go to the park with us?” we would ask her, and she’d smirk:

“Because I don’t like greenery.”

“Will you help us make a snowman?”

“No, snow is too white. But here’s a carrot for his nose.” She made these claims with such proud self-amusement that we couldn’t help but acknowledge her God-given right to dislike nature, or even child-rearing.

Now in New York, I no longer pined for her to take me along everywhere she went. I was too busy crossing off items from my growing-up list. I already knew how to whistle and light a match. I also clipped my own nails and was an old hand at reading books in Persian with adult-size type and no illustrations.

The four of us living in a one-bedroom apartment, albeit on the Upper East Side, expanded my definition of “poor.” Money did not flow freely to us. My parents couldn’t fool me; I was 9. We didn’t lack comfort or even trips abroad, but now I lived in the same neighborhood as rich New York families and attended school with their children, so I had occasion to compare more than just waxed tile. Those kids had country homes and tennis lessons. Us? We had floor mattresses. That’s how we’d always slept.

Even without bed frames, our bedroom was pleasing to me. The spare furnishings, an arty combination of unfinished wood and primary colors, smelled like fresh lumber and appealed to my sense of symmetry because everything was in identical pairs. My mother had been the one to choose the furniture and set up our room. This successful momming endeavor made me think of her as growing up, in the same way that I kept tabs on my own growing up.

My notion of “growing up” probably missed the mark as much as my original notion of “poor.” Aside from picking up the skills of walking, snapping my fingers, and lighting those matches without supervision, growing up to me meant becoming “nicer.” By the time I completed this unimpressive checklist, after which I could declare myself old enough to keep a passport in my own possession, it seemed not at all worth it. I would have given up being full-grown so I’d also be relieved of the daunting burden of taking care of myself. But this dismaying moment of truth lay in the future.

At not-quite 10, life had a shine to it, and no object was ordinary, not even the radiator encasement I used as a hiding place. So when I started the fourth grade, whether I or my mother was doing the growing up, it didn’t have to mean anything other than becoming nicer.

It also didn’t occur to me that coming from Iran would make me some sort of anomaly in school. New York was a big city, but being from Tehran, we were already from a big city. As a child, one is dragged around and placed in situations according to other people’s whims, and moving to America was no different. I only saw myself as a kid with too-curly hair and a secret sense of superiority, no more an outsider at school in Manhattan than I’d already been in Iran. Those who misunderstood my frown of intense thinking stayed away from me rather than picked on me, except during the next year when for a week my classmates called out “Ayatollah Khomeini” each time I walked by.

The American grade-schoolers somehow seemed to blame me for the Iran hostage crisis. I felt an active, churning hatred toward Khomeini, the deranged cleric who ruined my country. But taunting a young girl by yelling out the name of a despot didn’t cut too deep, and soon they dropped it. I worried instead about being judged for my too-short corduroys in the boy colors of brown or tan. My real self, new to English and buried beneath a shyness I couldn’t overcome, sank a little deeper because of the unfortunate clothing my mother picked out for me.

Around the time kids took to showing off the labels of their 80s jeans, my mother, too, went shopping on my behalf. She may have done right by our bedroom, but when it came to my clothes, she only managed to buy funny-looking off-brands. While other kids showcased ornate designer stitching on their butts, my new “poor people” jeans were plain and two sizes too big.

Still, the jeans represented my mother’s effort. Even though I no longer let on, I looked up to her, emotionally hoarding her momming gestures. Though the results of her cooking were inconsistent, never would I leave a morsel of uneaten food she had prepared. She buttered bread for me in the morning to go with my hot chocolate and packed fresh fruit in my lunch bag. I couldn’t fathom how other kids went through their snack bags and systematically threw out whole oranges and apples.

“Why not take home instead of wasting?” I’d ask, thinking I’d appeal to their logic but instead triggering their contempt. My accented, reluctant English also earned me the reputation of being “thick.” Those kids couldn’t have known that there was no greater insult to me than to attack my intellect — my antelekt that I’d come to regard with snickering pride, as if I were the only one my age in possession of it. For the duration of elementary school, I had to survive the wound of being considered the opposite of antelektooel while knowing its actual meaning.

On the rare occasion when kids troubled to befriend me, I was quick to alienate them. One stray new student who had joined the class midyear trotted up to me during recess before anyone had a chance to warn her of my status as weird.

“Hi, is purple your favorite color?” She was impish, and I was in awe of her ability to make her voice bright and heard.

“Not actually,” I replied with my accent and peculiar word choices, even though I knew every preteen girl’s favorite color was purple in 1980.

“Do you like Grease?” She asked. “Is it your favorite record?” She took out a big wad of purple bubblegum from her mouth and threw it on the ground.

“You should pick up that,” I said. “Someone can step. It won’t be nice for them.” She gave me a look that read, You weird, haughty little fuck, and walked away. Later I asked my father to take me to the record store.

“We are looking for the band Grease,” my father said to the store clerk. My father’s voice was deep and distinguished. He had a striking head of graying hair and eyes that seemed to reflect sunlight indoors.

“The band Grease?” The store clerk chortled. “No such band. There’s a musical. Movie came out last year.” I dropped my eyes, wondering how long it would take before my family and I stopped sticking out.

My father paid for the album, and as soon as we stepped onto the sidewalk, I tore off the cellophane. At home, I listened to the record on repeat and decided I liked Grease much better than purple.

Fifth grade was about the Ming Dynasty, Greek mythology, and sexism. Prior to my teacher’s explanation of gender inequality, I had no indication that a sane society might think less of me because I wasn’t a boy. After all, I was born to a mother who had never bothered with anyone else’s expectations and a father who had treated me with respect, not to mention that people who oppressed women were supposed to be backward fanatics like the ones who were spoiling my country.

By age 11, I also learned to smoke cigarettes under the bridge next to the East River. I hid my pack inside the radiator encasement in the bedroom I shared with my brother. Marlboro reds cost eighty-five cents at the newsstand down the street. The gruff old man with the paperboy hat didn’t miss a beat selling them to me, though I wasn’t physically developed and couldn’t have appeared more than eight. He ignored me with the same disdain he doled out to everyone else, which weirdly designated him the first New Yorker to make me feel like I was where I belonged.

Walking around my neighborhood, I would sometimes see teenage girls, tall, thin-legged, and dangerous in their heavy-metal shirts, their hair painstakingly feathered. Among us young ones the rumor ran that their gapped legs were due to sex and drugs. They wore jean jackets, extra-thick eyeliner, and a feather dangling from one ear. There was no hiding under the bridge for them — they smoked out in the open and ruled the sidewalk. At night they sat on top of the picnic tables in John Jay Park and drank beer, throwing the cans at their feet. It was hard to imagine them snuggling in bed with their parents and watching Tom and Jerry.

The next year during lunch, my sixth-grade class would walk half a block to the same John Jay Park. Us girls would sit on the swings while the boys stood on them, facing us with their legs on either side of our bodies.

“Can I ride you?” the boy would ask first, then hop onto the swing and prompt it back and forth by swaying his pelvis. So I learned what it felt like to have a boy near me, the little hairs all over my body standing at attention. Around the same time, I stopped comparing my family to other families — I was preoccupied with impending puberty and receiving my sex education from Judy Blume books.

Soon I began losing most of my Persian accent too.

A year later when I read Catcher in the Rye, the sheep fell over the cliff, and I thought of the teenage girls from my neighborhood, wondering what had become of them. One September they had disappeared from the streets, but in my mind, they remained forever those dangerous girls strutting down the block with too much eyeliner. After Catcher in the Rye, I envisioned them falling over a cliff, but somehow I was there too, falling upside down and wearing my own jean jacket.

Maybe among the truths of growing up piling around me, I grasped that happiness would never again be as uncomplicated as my mother taking me to the supermarket.

There had been a time when working out a problem — how to whistle, snap my fingers, or cross the street — took mere repetition. Back then I clumped together soil and grass to understand the nature of an antelektooel by making one. But by the time I picked up smoking under the bridge, I knew the means to satisfaction wouldn’t work the old way anymore. Living with that knowledge hurt as much as realizing we were never going back to live in Iran, that wonderland of rooftop nights and my childhood.

***

This essay first appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of SliceOur thanks to Hedia Anvar and the staff at Slice for allowing us to reprint it.

Staten Island Wilderness, Going, Going, Gone?

Helen Bohorquez/VWPics via AP Images

In 1956, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell published his now legendary story, “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” about one of the oldest survivors of a 19th-century village of black oystermen on Staten Island. That world was endangered back then. Sixty-two years later, that world is mostly gone.

For Curbed, photographeer Nathan Kensinger travels to Staten Island to document Sharrotts Shoreline, a patch of land he calls “a remote wilderness” that’s threatened by development. It’s hard to imagine any place in the five boroughs qualifying as remote wilderness, but this section of southern Staten Island is highly inaccessible, and neglect has allowed native plants and animals to thrive among the dumped cars and old spare tires.

As it wanders through a forested area, the creek cuts through an old oyster midden, where discarded oyster shells are stacked up into a high pile. These sites are often of great archaeological interest, with other artifacts often mixed in to the oyster shells. The midden is one of several in the area, and could date back to either the colonial era or to earlier Native American settlements. “You can still see Native American artifacts around Charleston,” says Matarazzo, who has extensively explored this section of Tappen’s Creek.

Further inland along its route, the creek passes through a wetlands area situated alongside Ellis Road. According to maps, the flow of the creek here is much the same as it was over 100 years ago.

Kenigner hikes with the Protectors of Pine Oak Woods, photographing as they go. As they walk, they discuss whether they can save the land’s old burial grounds and oyster middens, and they talk with neighors to gauge the potential loss to the community.

A portion of this property is currently maintained by neighbors, who have installed birdhouses for a purple martin colony. “The inky, iridescent birds winter in Brazil and migrate some 4,000 miles to return to their digs,” according to the Staten Island Advance. “It would be a shame if they sell that land. It’s so full of wildlife,” says one neighbor, who lives across the street from the Sharrotts Road development property. “It doesn’t make any sense, because just down the hill, you are on protected State land.”

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The Urban Crisis of Affluence

Skyscrapers
Photo by Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images

After three decades living in and around New York City, I, too, am leaving to make way for the only people the city is still welcoming: billionaires who don’t live here.

In Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker writes at length in “The Death of a Once Great City” about how the few who can afford to build and buy in New York don’t want to live here, either. In one affluent twenty-block corridor, “almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year.” A couple of neighborhoods south, developers at an eighty-three-unit luxury condo were recently offering “to throw in two studio apartments and two parking spots for any buyer willing to shell out $48 million for the building’s 7,000-square foot penthouse.” That’s five empty things for the price of one empty thing, in case you’d like to park dozens of millions of dollars in an investment property that’s big enough to fit dozens of homeless families.

Drawing from Michael Greenberg’s incisive piece on the city’s housing emergency last summer in The New York Review of Books, Baker connects the dots between empty penthouses and empty storefronts, decrying how “all that our urban leaders, in New York and elsewhere, Democratic as well as Republican, have been able to come up with is one scheme after another to invite the rich in.”

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there.

The new rich infesting the city are barely here. They keep a low profile, often for good reason, and rarely stick around. They manufacture nothing and run nothing, for the most part, but live off fortunes either made by or purloined from other people—sometimes from entire nations. The New Yorker noted in 2016 that there is now a huge swath of Midtown Manhattan, from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue, from 49th Street to 70th Street, where almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year. New York today is not at home. Instead, it has joined London and Hong Kong as one of the most desirable cities in the world for “land banking,” where wealthy individuals from all over the planet scoop up prime real estate to hold as an investment, a pied-à-terre, a bolt-hole, a strongbox.

A triplex at the forthcoming 220 Central Park South will reportedly be sold for $200 million, and a four-story apartment at the same address is priced to move at $250 million. These would be the largest home sales ever recorded anywhere in the United States.

Who spends this sort of money for an apartment? The buyers are listed as hedge fund managers, foreign and domestic; Russian oligarchs; Chinese apparel and airline magnates. And increasingly, to use a repeated Times term, a “mystery buyer,” often shielded by a limited liability company.

This is not the benevolent “gentrification” that Michael Bloomberg seemed to have had in mind but something more in the tradition of the king’s hunting preserves, from which local peasants were banned even if they were starving and the king was far away.

There are now so many of the supertalls gathered so closely together that they threaten to leave the lower sections of Central Park, the only true architectural marvel to be seen here, in shadow for much of the year. One simulation found that the shadows of the highest towers may knife a mile into the park on the winter solstice.

When the journalist Warren St. John protested against these towers that block the sun and literally leave children shivering in the park, he pointed out that the highest supertall apartments—when they are occupied at all—house maybe a few hundred people, as opposed to the 40 million individuals who use Central Park every year. But this seems to be the calculation on which New York now operates.

Even for those who can afford the new New York, it is unclear how much they actually like it or maintain any ability to shape it to their tastes. What is the point, after all, of paying a fortune to live in a city that is more and more like everywhere else?

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Sign O’ The Times: Paisley Park Offers A Public Tour

Prince performs during the halftime show at Super Bowl XLI on February 4, 2007 at Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

For The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich tours Paisley Park, the home and recording studio of the late Prince. What she learns is that no matter how close you may get in physical proximity, even in death Prince maintains a carefully curated distance between him, his fans, and the world.

Mostly, the tour made me feel lonesome. Absent its owner, Paisley Park is a husk. In 2004, when Prince briefly rented a mansion in Los Angeles from the basketball player Carlos Boozer, he redesigned the place, putting his logo on the front gate, painting pillars purple, installing all-black carpet, and adding a night club. (Boozer threatened to sue, but Prince restored the house before he moved out.) Yet Paisley Park feels anonymous. His studios are beautiful, but unremarkable. There are many photos of him, and his symbol is omnipresent, but I was hoping for evidence of his outsized quirks and affectations—clues to some bigger truth. I found little that seemed especially personal. Paisley Park presents Prince only as a visionary—not as a father, a husband, a friend, or a son.

Although Prince’s estate has disregarded some of his preferences—his discography is now available on Spotify, a platform he pulled his music from in 2015, in part because he believed that the company didn’t compensate artists properly—there’s something profound about how Paisley Park insists on maintaining Prince’s privacy. It does not need to modernize him (which feels unnecessary), or even to humanize him (which feels impossible). In 2016, the most common response to Prince’s death was disbelief. His self-presentation was so carefully controlled that he never once betrayed his own mortality. He’d done nothing to make us think he was like us. During parties, Prince sometimes stood in a dark corner of the balcony and watched other people dance. Visiting Paisley Park now evokes a similar sensation—of being near Prince, but never quite with him.

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A Woman’s Work: Home Economics* (*I Took Woodworking Instead)

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,600 words)

By the time I was 44 I’d never lived with a boyfriend, a fact that I, a woman living under a patriarchy and not getting any younger, sometimes thought should be bothering me more, but which didn’t.

I even had fond memories of a day when I was 41 and freshly dumped, on which I woke up alone in bed, stretched out, and had a remarkable, quite unexpected realization…

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