Halloween Poems

When I was in the fourth grade at Trinity Lutheran School back in 1975 I wrote a series of Halloween themed poems. With my mother's prompting (because it was an art project and she always wanted to instigate things like that) I illustrated the poems and made a little booklet. I was so proud I took it to school and my teacher, Ms. Smith put it into the class bookshelf.

Twelve years later I was working at Trinity as the assistant sexton when I came across the book still sitting on the shelf. I promptly took it home and put it in a box.

Moving out of my apartment last month I came across the book in a box of junk. It was in worse shape after twenty one years of my careful stewardship than twelve on a dusty fourth grade bookshelf. Figures.

I like the poems (though I admit the use of the word "boss" in the last two lines of "Wise Witch" is inexcusable even for a nine year old) and happy with the pictures. Unfortunately the cover and the poem, "Zing the Thing" are missing. Perhaps they'll turn up as I finish unpacking but considering my track record at not losing things I kind of doubt it.


I know, "morgue" is misspelled


Is that a ghost or a midget in a sheet and does that zombie have sciatica?



I like the spaceship and the Martian sigil on its fin




Who tied the bib on the shark?




I seriously like the effect caused by no outline around the cross. It sort of glows more brightly.

The Church Project

So I didn't get the slightest chance to work on my vaunted church project. Between moving into the new homestead, unpacking, and dealing with a contractor and his subcontracting minions the church project has been put on hold. With some luck and careful planning (and those who know me know how likely that's to happen) I should be able to get started this fall.

I'm back(ish)

So I have finished exiting my apartment of the past six years, thrown away dozens of bags of junk, given away several large pieces of distinctly mediocre furniture, donated several working appliances and nice articles of clothing to the Salvation Army and have moved my remaining stuff and my wife's stuff into our home.

Upon moving I we promptly realized I still had too much stuff to keep it all. My first task was to start culling books. Despite having bookshelves that run the length of our home they are not enough.



I have gone through all my books and pulled boxes and boxes worth of things I have will never read/read again/admit I ever bought. I have pulled hundreds of books and it was slightly heartbreaking but it will continue. The proceeds from the sales of books on Amazon will NOT be used to just buy more books. In fact, it will in all likelihood they'll be plowed into buying things to store the remaining things I own.

Staten Island's Boat Graveyard

For as long as I can remember (and some days that further back than others), I can recall seeing numerous rusting boats and small ships in the waters off Tottenville. I know I'm more concerned with the North Shore but this stuff is really, really cool.

I found someone's cool photo collection of the ship graveyard and here's the link.

Boat Graveyard Gallery

Million Dollar Wall

So I don't know exactly why this massive retaining wall was so named but I'll guess it's the obvious one - it cost a million dollars. There's definitely something to be said for letting the public know what a municipal undertaking costs. Remember, the government does nothing to earn money. It only gets money by taking it from us and then, ideally, spending it on things we'll all benefit from.

What's cool about the older picture below is the view of the rail yards. There were rail bridges and barges (my grandfather worked as a carpenter for the Erie-Lackawana Railroad fixing them) that brought everything to the Island it needed. There's another picture I'll try to track down that shows a birdseye view of the railyards from the other direction and really leaves the viewer impressed by their size. Now there's nothing there of any consequence (c'mon, it's pretty but the Yankee's Minor League stadium just doesn't count) except the 9/11 Memorial and parking lots almost up to the water's edge. Someday there might be a passenger train again along the north shore but sort of massive industrial undertaking represented by the railyards will never be replicated.

What I've Read Since March 20th

Lehane, Denis Gone Baby Gone - solid crime writing
Pelecanos, George Shame the Devil - overdone crime writing
Smith, Scott The Ruins - interesting failure
Higgins, George V. The Friends of Eddie Coyle - amazing crime writing Hedges, Chris I Don't Believe in Atheists - too rambling
Puzo, Mario The Godfather - some of the best garbage ever
Mignola, Mike Garden of Souls - great BPRD
Chabon, Michael Maps and Legends - good essays, even better cover
Cotterill, Colin Thirty-Three Teeth - great
Cotterill, Colin Disco for the Departed - great
Wright, N.T. The Gospel of Jesus and Judas - good critique of gnosticism
Brooks, Terry The Scions of Shannara - fun, dumb diversion
Brooks, Terry The Druid of Shannara - see above
Cussler, Clive Raise the Titanic - one of the worst books I've ever, ever read
Mignola, Mike Dark Calls - usual high quality Hellboy stuff
Williams, Tad Shadowmarch - surprisingly good
Ingle, Bob and McClure, Sandy The Soprano State -riveting and utterly depressing examination of NJ corruption

My Tie

This lovely tie was bought for me by my Aunt K. She was quite aware of my infatuation with all things New York City and I had recently become employed by an agency of the city. I worked on Chambers Street, right across from the Tweed Courthouse Building. That's just above the park in the lower center of the tie picture.

At the time my taste in ties was particularly retro. None of the ties I wore were more than a few inches wide and none were especially colorful. In fact they all tended toward black and navy blue. I wore this tie once.

Recently, during the slow process of cleaning out things and boxes others up in order to one day move into my new home I came across this poor bedraggled tie hanging deep within my bedroom closet. I can't bring myself to wear the thing but I don't want to just throw it away. So I took a picture. If you find yourself falling in love with the poor item it will be available for sale at the yard sale I'm participating in on the sidewalk in front of St. Paul's/St. Luke's Lutheran Church on the corner of Decker Avenue and Catherine Street in Port Richmond, Staten Island on Saturday, June 14th, 2008. There'll be plent o' junk for all.

Memorial Day

I won't talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because my own feelings are long, complicated and too depressing to wade through right now. I will, however, put up this link to CNN about the Americans killed since the Long War began over five years ago. My father always was annoyed that Memorial Day became a sort of general military celebration instead of what it should be - a day to commemorate and pay homage to the thousands of men (and women) who've had their lives cut short while serving in uniform.

Iraq War Dead
Afghanistan War Dead


Whatever your feelings about the war, these Americans served where few of us have the courage or inclination to do so and they generally do so with at least a fair degree of honor (Abu Ghraib as the big exception and that's got a lot to do with the bosses) and without the frothing at the mouth craziness too often expressed in the news or movies.


So take a few minutes and remember these dead men and women and think about their families and the gap they'll never fill. This war isn't working out the way it was planned or presented to the public, but those things aside for the moment, it reminds us that their are hundreds of thousands of Americans willing to submit to the discipline of the armed forces and then risk their lives in order to do the really dirty work we need done.

Married

So I've been distracted from posting my bits 'o' nostalgia because I got married. I haven't forgotten my loyal readers (both of them) and I will return shortly. But I did (did I mention?) get married and I'm getting a house done so I'm a little off track with Ape Shall Not Kill Ape these days. Later.

Albany

I don't know how that book made it there. I lived in that cold, dank town for three years. I can't tell you enough how cold and snow covered it gets there from November to March. Brrrr.

My New York Reference Library

Here's a picture of my slowly growing library of New York and Staten Island books. It's a collection of big easily obtained things like Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" and "The Encyclopedia of New York City" as well as harder to find books like Dorothy Valentine Smith's classic "Staten Island; Gateway to New York" and Jack Newfield and Paul DuBrul's The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York"" (it's the broken up one on the left without a spine. I found it in the often cool but more than a little creepy 'Everything Goes' store on Bay Street).

There are some excellent books about the Dutch and English settlement of the area that I bought for my dad and have now transferred to my collection. I also have most of the commercially available books about the Island (except "The Jewish Community of Staten Island" which I need for some great synagogue and Jersey Street pictures) There are a few gems about Staten Island that I'd love to get but don't seem to be available at even ridiculous prices. The best is Staten Island and It's People: A History, 1609-1929" by Leng and Davis". For those I'll have to rely on the College of Staten Island's Staten Island Archive located in the school's library.

I used to keep the shelf in pretty good order (by subject then alpha by author), but with all the work I've been doing lately I just pull things down and put them back up at random. There's really no excuse, but heh, what am I going to do?


My cluttered, sloppy work place. Inexcusable.

Staten Island Hospital

I, and most of my friends growing up, were born at the original Staten Island Hospital on Castleton Avenue at the head of Cebra Avenue. For most of my childhood it stood there, staff and patients flowing in and out, using the florists and gift stores that graced the nearby intersection of Cebra and Victory Boulevard. When Jim D. hit my five year old forehead with a rock it's where I was brought kicking and screaming to get stitches. Later I went to study for my dentistry merit badge in the offices in the back of the complex.

I understand the need to build a big, modern facility as the Island grew but I was disappointed when Staten Island Hospital moved to Seaview Avenue in Ocean Breeze. No one knew what was going to happen to the complex of buildings on Castleton Avenue but they would be empty for at least a little while. Of course my friends and I decided at once to figure out how to get inside them and explore.

When the old hospital first closed there was a guard house built at the front door, so Bruce N., Jesse B., and I simply went around back. We found a hole in the fence by the driveway on the complex's side on Webster Avenue. We looked for open windows and after half and hour or so of skulking around we found one. We had to climb up to get to it and then drop down several feet once inside the building. The three of us found ourselves in a small, non-descript office that had been stripped of all furniture. A few scattered papers lay on the floor but nothing indicated what it had once been.

We decided to carefully make our way into the rest of the hospital. Fortunately we were being very cautious and quiet. As we entered the hallway we heard the very distinctive sound of dog's claws on the linoleum. Fear exploded in us at once and we made ran back into the room. Jesse was little (he was ten at the time) so we boosted him up and out. Then Bruce climbed up and then he helped me up. We ran as fast as we could out the driveway and caught our breaths. When we walked back around onto Castleton Avenue we looked at the guard house and realized there was some sort of cage around the front door. Guard dogs were being allowed to patrol the building at will and we'd almost been caught.

That incident kept us away from the building for several months. The next time we went back was over Easter break. This time Jim D. came with us. We decided not to go into the buildings but just explore around the back. Behind the main buildings on Castleton Avenue were a series of auxiliary buildings and clinics. We found the generators in fine working condition along with piles of packages of sutures and needles. They were just lying on the ground and we helped ourselves to them. I don't know why and they served no purpose except, perhaps, as trophies of our expedition.

After that decided to make a climb up the fire escape that ran up the back of the Samuel R. Smith Infirmary, the heart of the old buildings on Castleton. We made our way up the stairs trying to keep as quiet as possible. It didn't make us invisible. Half way up to the third floor we heard an amplified voice yelling at us to "Get down from there!" We obliged and were down and out the hole in the fence in nothing flat. Again we stayed away for months.

We did keep an eye on the place, looking for any changes. Eventually we noticed that the dog cage was gone. We went around back again but the window was sealed. We came back a few hours later with a homemade grappling hook hoping to get up on the back of a low roofed part of the newer hospital building. It didn't work and we didn't get in.

GRAPPLING SITE

Again we kept our eyes on the place and soon there weren't anymore guards. The buildings, a little more than a year after closing, had simply been abandoned. It was the time for a full on expedition. On Columbus Day 1980 we took the chance and snuck into the old Staten Island Hospital.

The party consisted of me, Jim D., Jesse B. and Alex R., the same group that would go into the Silver Lake Reservoir some months later. We had flashlights, ropes, pocket knives and matches. I can't imagine what anyone seeing us walk over Cebra Avenue to Castleton would have thought of us but no one so much as glanced at us.

We started by going around back like in all our other efforts. We made sure no cars were on Webster and went through the fence hole. We were hoping we could find an open door or at least a window we could break without being seen. We found a door pretty quickly and were soon in the building. We decided to just wander around and eventually make our way to the roof of the new building. Alex. R.'s would be our guide as he knew his way around the place. His father was a medical person and had worked in the place for years before it closed.

We wandered around the first floor for some time just seeing what was to be seen. It was obvious that anything left behind by the hospital move had since been stolen if it had any value. Copper wire and light fixtures had been ripped out and removed. Door knobs, switch panels and sink fixtures were all gone. That hadn't been the case a few months earlier. It also meant that people other than us had been watching for changes in the security arrangements. It meant we had to be cautious.

Alex decided to take us into the older buildings. He said there was an underground passage in the basement that would be cool to use. We went down stairs, flashlights casting thin illumination into the tunnel's utter blackness, and started walking. When Alex started telling us that the tunnel was for moving bodies around I admit I just wanted to get out back into the light. A few minutes later we were.

The old buildings were in the same shape as the new one. They'd been stripped bare of anything that could be sold or reused. It was a little sad and astonishing to realize. I had heard about the Bronx burning and being abandoned a few years earlier but that was something in the news. Besides, the Bronx were a faraway place that meant nothing to me other than the zoo. How had this happened? It was no small undertaking to clear out the buildings like they'd been, so where had the police been? Didn't the Staten Island Hospital care?

We decided it was time to head to the roof. We went back to the new building (not through the tunnel) and found a staircase. We made our way upward, occasionally getting out and exploring a few rooms before continuing our climb. We were on one of the upper floors when we saw the light.

We'd come out onto the floor from the stairs and found ourselves in fairly dark surroundings. Some of the floors were well lit because the doors to the rooms were open. That wasn't the case on this floor so we brought out our flashlights. We were looking around when Jim said "Stop." He thought heard something from the end of the hall we were in and wanted to listen. Suddenly we saw the clear light of cigarette light flame. We didn't hear anything or see anything else. The four of us froze for a second or two and then ran all the way down the stairs and out the driveway. It was the last time we went into the hospital.

We speculated about what it was. In the end we decided it was one of what were probably lots of bums living in the buildings. It was no longer safe and we would never go back.

Over the years the buildings have fallen into deeper and deeper decay. There was plan in the mid-eighties to turn them into condos but that was a money laundering scheme that left dozens of tenants ripped off and in debt. Over the years a few con men set themselves as the rightful owners and let people rent the apartments from them but they were eventually evicted by the city and the lower floors of the buildings sealed with cement.

Later the back buildings were crushed by snow on their rotting roofs and the city pulled them down. Their outlines remain in the aerial shots on Google Earth. Now the large old buildings, the Samuel R. Smith Infirmary and the Nursing Building are rotting away and falling down. The city refused to landmark them in 1983, said though they'd like to in 1987 they couldn't, and finally has just left them to melt into the ground.


Stolen from someone's flickr page (above)





It's in the trees - it's coming (above)




The cheesy castle roof was added during the condo scheme (above)

Charlton Heston, RIP

First Richard Widmark,now Charlton Heston. If you think you know Heston's work just by some of his duller, stolider performances, check out "The Big Country", "Will Penny" or "Treasure Island". The man might have been limited but he's one of the last great iconic Hollywood superstars. I miss actors and actresses who not only brought themselves to the screen but I actually liked that self.

He got grief from some of the dopier elements for his conservative politics, but this was a man who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1963 march on Washington. I'd like to see somebody today take that sort of career risk, by which mean I'd be very happy.

New Projects

While I'm hoping to put together something about the old Staten Island Hospital this week, I'm working on two larger projects. The first will be about the secret architectural history of the North Shore of Staten Island and the second about its plethora of old churches.

The secret history project is about all the beautiful homes that once lined the North Shore's tree lined streets. I always knew there had been big mansions and estates but only as I've been going through books and archives have I started to get a sense of all the other buildings that have been lost over the decades. On as regular a basis as I can manage I'll add a picture or two with commentary when able.

This is where the St. George Municipal Parking Lot now sits. If you look closely at the picture's center you can make out the cupola on the house that's in present day picture of St. Mark's Place. I count at least ten large homes where the lot is today and the picture only shows its upper half.

My plan is to collect historical pictures of some of these buildings and get as many of the few remaining ones with my camera. The hard part will be tracking down histories of the houses but I will try.

The church project is a whole different thing. Staten Island has a long history of Christian denominational diversity. Some of it was based on theological differences and some on ethnicity. At one point there where half a dozen German, Norwegian and Swedish Lutheran congregations, as well as Episcopal and Methodist churches (with missions to the immigrant groups), and Baptist, Dutch Reform, Presbyterian and, of course, Roman Catholics.

Over the years, as populations shifted (to New Jersey) and the strength of the old Protestant denominations waned many of the older churches were sold to different denominations. I used to think this was a new phenomenon but my research has already disabused me of this idea. People were always moving away while others were moving in. During the great immigration periods around the beginning of the twentieth century this happened all over Staten Island. The same sort of thing has been happening again for the last thirty years.

My obsession with the North Shore's churches started when I discovered this beautiful old building on Delafield Avenue. At the time it was an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva but I didn't know anything about its history.

Since then I've learned quite a bit (it was the Elizabeth Methodist Episcopal Church and its congregation merged with Grace Methodist's in the sixties and formed Faith United in Port Richmond. The building was sold to a Jewish shul and later a yeshiva. Now it's abandoned) and it's only left me wanting to know more. So the project was conceived. With luck and work it should be done sometime this fall, though I suspect it will always be undergoing updates and revisions. There are about sixty churches I've discovered that I want to get exterior, interior and historical pictures of as well as historical data.

I plan to start with the Port Richmond Reformed Church as it's the oldest congregation on the North Shore and exists pretty much today as it looks in this old picture. It's surrounded by a graveyard with seventeenth century headstones in it which I remember reading when I went to Port Richmond when I was a little kid.

From there I plan to move on to the dozen or so churches that have changed congregations and denominations, or in the case of a few, face demolition. After that I'll get to the rest. Each building and congregation has its own history that I want to collect in a single place.

As a Lutheran I'm interested in how other Christians worship and what things they surround themselves with in terms of buildings and interior appointments. As a Staten Islander and historian I'm fascinated with the borough's shifting populations, demographics and development. Hopefully I'll convince other people that it's equally intriguing. If not you'll at least have, hopefully, dozens of very cool pictures to look at.

Sorry - Here's the New Pictures

So I promised pictures and I didn't deliver right away. I apologize.

I have a few bigger projects connected with this site percolating right now and they, plus work, plus wedding have led to distractions. I did manage to drive around and collect some cool pictures but I failed to get them up in a timely fashion. Let's go.

This is the intersection of Port Richmond Avenue and Richmond Terrace in, naturally, Port Richmond. Once the commercial center of the western side of the North Shore, the neighborhood fell on hard times with the opening of Forest Avenue Shoppers' Town in the sixties and died with the opening of the Staten Island Mall in the mid-seventies. It struggled on for years, trying unsuccessfully to reinvent itself as a location for furniture dealers. When that failed it became a neighborhood for Mexican immigrants, legal and otherwise.

Now on a typical morning you can see dozens of men shaping up to bust their humps for inadequate pay. The old Jewish and Italian owned shops have mostly been replaced with dollar stores and Mexican delis. The old apartment buildings and apartments over all the stores are now packed to the gills with far too many people to be safe for their inhabitants.

I first noticed this particular building when I took to biking along the Terrace to get to the Bayonne Bridge. At the time it looked like it probably did at the turn of the last century. It was built by a local industrialist and by the eighties had become a residence for older, single men.

Since then, about 1982, several of the buildings on the left have burned down and the whole area has fallen down the tubes. I think the building on the right was still open as a bank, but now, after a fleeting time as evangelical church it's abandoned.
I wasn't able to get the exact same perspective as the original picture because there are buildings on the spot the original must have been taken from.




When I first saw the picture of St. Mark's Place in St. George from the 30's I thought I recognized the turreted home on the left. When I went to get the comparison shot I was disabused of that notion. Nothing in the old picture exists anymore except part of the stone retaining wall. The beautiful homes and the small stores are all gone, replaced by some of the ugliest buildings on the Island. The original Brighton Heights Dutch Reform Church, built in the 1820's, burned down in 1996 during a renovation project gone awry when heat guns went wild.

I've also added a picture cribbed from Staten Island historian, Thomas Matteo's book, "Then & Now Staten Island". It's a closer look at the church and the pretty brick home next to it that's tantalizingly unclear in the first picture. Today its lot holds an ugly little building that used to house a Manufacturer's Hanover bank, then a church and now, nothing, I think. Ah, architectural progress. Can it get any better?





I have no specific knowledge of the Stork's Nest or the Stork's Nest II. It's one of those neighborhood bars that I've seen from the bus all my life, but not living in the exact neighborhood (Tompkinsville) never really knew anything about or anyone who went there.

At some time in the past it was obviously some sort of big deal. Now it's subdivided and the ornamental stork has long flow the nest. It's a little hard to tell from the present day picture (the park across the street from where I'd need to be to get a matching shot is fenced off for renovations), but the left side of the original Stork is now a Central American restaurant.

When I was little, Tompkinsville was heavily Italian with some black families starting to move in. Later the older Italians died off and their kids moved out of the area. At some point a lot of the clientele of the methadone clinic in Stapleton seemed to be living in the old apartments above the stores in the area.

In the nineties the neighborhood changed again. Like in Port Richmond there was a sudden influx of immigrants of both legal and illegal status. Many of them are from Honduras, Guatemala and the rest of Central America. Over the years their presence has led to the establishment of shops geared towards their tastes and wants. This is one of those places.

The Staten Island Historian

I just came across the site for our borough's own historian. The Staten Island Historian, is an unpaid post that was occupied by the late Dick Dickerson for many years. The new man, Tom Matteo, has got a nifty website going but it left me a little disappointed. He's got the same NYPL Digital Collection links I've got but he doesn't offer any additional information. One of the drawbacks of the NYPL's collection is that there's too little detail about the pictures. Too many give little real indication of their locations and dates. I was hoping the Borough Historian would have access to information the rest of us don't.

Nonetheless, there's plenty of great stuff on the page and it does bring the NYPL pictures together by easily searchable categories (ex. churches, schools, etc.). Definitely worth examining.

Upcoming Things

Work and labors for my upcoming wedding have prevented me from getting out and getting the pictures I need to show in contrast to the olde-timey postcards and photos. Be happy with these little tidbits for the moment and I'll get something more substantive done over the weekend.

Why I Do This

The first inkling of what would become the present version of Ape Shall Not Kill Ape came about when I saw the following poster:



The utter dumbness of the ad and the cheap shade of orange reminded me of so many ads of my youth that I was compelled to get a picture of it. Then I was faced with what should I do with the picture. I've got lots of pictures tucked away in various directories on my computer that just sit their in digital silence and are eventually forgotten. WondeRoast demanded more of me than oblivion.

I remember the reds, blues and oranges of the window ads and sale signs in the five and dime stores of my youth: Woolworth, of course, but also Kresge's, W.T. Grant's, Kress', McCrory's and Lamston's. My mom would go off shopping for socks or whatever and I'd wander the toy aisles and pet section. That silly WondeRoast ad managed to rekindle some of those odds and ends of my memory and I owed it something for that little blessing.

So here's WondeRoast. It hangs in the northfacing window of La Mexicana Deli and Grocery on the corner of Broadway and Cary Avenue in the poorer section of my own neighborhood of West New Brighton. Hey, it might even be good.

What I've Read Since January, 1, 2008

Reeve, Philip Starcross
Carroll, Lewis Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Carroll, Lewis Through the Looking Glass
Chesterton,G.K. The Everlasting Man
Pushkin,Alexander The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
Durrenmatt, F. The Pledge
Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory
Bloom, Harold Novelists and Novels
L'Engle, Madeline Walking on Water
Powers, Tim The Drawing of the Dark
Burke, James Lee Crusader's Cross
Burke, James Lee Pegasus Rising
Burke, James Lee Tin Roof Blowdown
Lehane, Denis A Drink Before the War
Lippman, Laura The Power of Three
Higgins, George V. The Friends of Eddie Coyle

To the Center of the Earth

THE CAUSEWAY AT SILVER LAKE PARK

In 1980 and 1981, New York City suffered one of the greatest droughts in its history. Its reservoirs dropped to around a quarter of their capacity and Ed Koch popularized the beautifully cheesy "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down". As a fourteen year old it really didn't seem to have any bearing on me whatsoever. However, it did lead to one of the coolest adventures my friends and I ever had.

For one reason or another we wandered into Silver Lake Park on our way back to my friend Alex's new house on Howard Avenue after a trek down Victory Blvd. to Luke & John's Deli for sandwiches. It was the start of summer and Alex and I had just finished our freshman years.

When we entered the park we were startled to see that the lake's level had dropped an easy six or seven feet. It was amazing. The sides of the causeway were exposed and we could see the place beyond the stone shoreline where it dropped off to the lake bottom. We had to get closer and see whatever else there was to see.

We went down to the lake and climbed the low black fence that borders it went down to the water's edge. We started walking along the shore skipping stones and looking for anything that might be considered cool. About fifty feet from the north side of the causeway on the lake's east side we found the sort of thing we hoped to find - a concrete tunnel.


AS IT LOOKS TODAY - THE TUNNEL ENTRANCE SUBMERGED

The tunnel appeared to run eastward from the lake into the heart of the hill that rose up from the shore and to Victory Blvd. Under that hill was the actual reservoir (the lake itself is merely decorative) and who knew what else.

We ran to Alex's house and grabbed flashlights. We got back to the lake as fast as we could, switched on our lights and entered the tunnel. We didn't go that far the first day. Our lights weren't that illuminating and the tunnel seemed endless. Its ceiling was high enough for all to stand in but only wide enough for us to be comfortable if we went in single file. We walked into the hillside only far enough to know we'd need to plan more thoroughly and be better equipped.

That night we planned our big incursion into the Silver Lake tunnel. We got big dry cell battery flashlights and rope. We didn't know where we'd actually need rope but it always seemed to indicate that whatever you were doing was going to be serious. We also got markers so we could leave signs to keep from getting lost and a crowbar to break things if needed.

The next day we undertook our great expedition. There was myself, and my three friends , Alex R., Jesse B. and Jim D. We went around noon time when the sun was high and rest of the world was at work. There were some adults swimming and sunning themselves around the tunnel entrance but they clearly didn't care about what we were doing.

With a rising sense of excitement we walked into the tunnel. Now well lit, the tunnel revealed itself to be a bare, cement construction that ran in a straight line into the hillside. We walked for about ten mintues, keeping a slow pace so as not to be surprised by anything, before the we came to the stairway.

Rising up at the end of the tunnel was metal staircase with grating levels. We, of course, started walking up them.

I don't remember how many levels we climbed but memory makes it seem like a lot. Finally we came to the top of the stairs and into a concrete gallery. There were metal rungs set into the wall facing Victory Blvd. leading to a metal hatch in the gallery ceiling. Towards the lake side of the room the wall only went up to our waists. With our flashlights in hand we looked over the wall and I think we all gasped.

Like I said, the hill housed the real Silver Lake Reservoir. I have slight memories from my childhood of construction going on the park but this picture does better justice to what's under that hill than anything I can describe - - -


UNDER THE HILL

Even with our big flashlights we couldn't see to the other side of the reservoir. We were basically where the bulldozer is in the picture above. The holding tanks are vast and silent and our lights made only the slightest dent in the dark space. Moved by the scope of what we were seeing I decided to commemorate the moment by writing my D& D character's name on the wall. Today there's probably still a little chalk scratching proclaiming that "Alzhak was here".

The final stage of our inward journey was to climb the rungs. I mean if there's a ladder at the end of a journey you can't not climb it. We assumed that the ladder would bring us into the control house and we were right.


THE CONTROL CENTER

The hatch in the gallery ceiling was silver colored and lifted right up when Jim pushed it. The rest of us were right behind him. We found ourselves in a control room with panels with meters and dials. Gaguges monitoring the water level and quality hummed with quiet electrical life and little lights blinked on the consoles in seeming random sequences.

Then the alarm went off and we hightailed it out like cats with their tails on fire. I'm not sure if the alarm had anything to do with us or with problems caused by sewer work going on out on Victory Blvd. but we quite sensibly assumed it was our fault and we climbed down the ladder, flew ourselves down the stairs and hightailed it down the tunnel as fast as we could managed without killing ourselves.

When we got back out into the light the adults asked us if we saw anything cool. We told them heck, yeah.


We went back the next day hoping to repeat the previous day's undertaking and spend more time in the control room but it wasn't to be. When we got to the top of the stairs we could see that the hatch was open. Before we even climbed out into the gallery a guy stuck his head down and told us not to move. Which we did. We were out of the tunnel even faster than the day before.

We went back one more time a week later and found that the tunnel had been sealed forever. Thick metal bars had been installed in the tunnel mouth and cemented into place. We had been thwarted by the city from carrying out any new expeditions.

Coming Soon - Beneath the Earth

Later today I hope to post pictures and a story about one of my more noteworthy adolescent undertakings.

Gary Gygax - RIP

My friend's brother went to school in Wisconsin and discovered Dungeons & Dragons in its early pamphlet form. My friend brought the books along on our Boy Scout camping trips, showed them to me and even reffed a few loose games. I'd already read "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" and coupled with the beautifully terrible illustrations of such wondrous things as Owl Bears and Black Puddings, I was hooked.

Eventually I stopped playing D&D. My buddies and I took our role-playing too seriously to stick with such a flawed and restrictive system. We moved to SPI's Dragonquest before settling on the HERO System. Our games became more engrossing and more complex. Looking back over my shoulder, though, I think that had more to do with our growing up and maturation than a different game system. For all the fun we had after D&D I don't think I ever recaptured that early falling in love with becoming submerged into games that were as much fairy tale as Howardesque sword and sorcery.

A socially misfit, fanboy, geek never had a such a friend as the man who created fantasy roleplaying. So thank you Gary Gygax and rest in peace.

Cool SIRT (Staten Island Rapid Transit) links

When I was a kid, my mom would take me and my sister to New Dorp to go shopping or in the summer see a Disney matinee at the Lane Movie Theater. Since we didn't drive we'd catch the old 103 bus in front of Trinity Lutheran Church at the foot of Cebra Avenue or we'd walk down and catch the train in Stapleton. Mostly she opted for the convenience of the bus but I remember plenty of rides on the old trains with wicker seats and conductors collecting fares.

When I was older my friends and I took to long, exploratory hikes around the North Shore. One of the coolest ones took us along the abandoned overpasses of the South Beach rail line. Now they've been pulled down and the old right-of-ways have been filled with houses.

So here are some pictures from several different sites. All are worth spending some time with and any native Islander should have some memories tugged by some of them.



Third Rail's SIRT issue

Forgotten New York - SIRT photos

Joe's SIRT photos

Someone else's cool SIRT photos

New Link

There's a new link on the page. It's for the NYPL's "Staten Island on the Web" section. I forgot to put it up last time so here it is. There's lots of fun stuff to be found. I was particularly looking for photos of the Bethlehem Ship Yards in Mariner's Harbor building destroyers during WW II but they're gone. Someday, maybe, I'll find them again and put them up.

Postcards by Grimshaw

So I found out about the postcards. All I had to do was type "W.J. Grimshaw" and postcards into google and it took me to the Grimshaw family page. I always feel extra stupid when it takes me a week to actually do the five seconds of work needed to solve a problem or answer a question.

William Grimshaw was born on October 14, 1830 in Accrington, Lancashire and emigrated to the U.S. in about 1847. After living for a brief time in Pennsylvania, he moved to Bordentown, New Jersey where he apparently married Emily Brown in 1853. After living there for more than 20 years, the family relocated to Staten Island in 1873, where William was engaged as a carpenter for the remainder of his life. William and Emily had at least four children -- William J., Frank P., Lamar C., and Margaret Grimshaw. William died in 1905 and Emily passed away in 1908. William's oldest son, William J., operated a stationery and confectionery business that became later focused on selling ice cream when it was first introduced.

Now Mr. Grimshaw and his son's postcards are collected for our pleasure on the NYPL's Digital Collection pages. I've said it before, check them out.

Richmond Terrace Apartments - the present

So here's the other building shown in the postcards posting. If the Prospect Gables have seen better days, then this place REALLY has seen better days.

It sits at the foot of York Avenue and Richmond Terrace. I'd wager that the postcard was created back when the Jersey Street area was still a thriving working class commercial strip for the surrounding homes on Westervelt and York. There was at least one synagogue, a Polish Catholic church and all manner of shops. There was a public school, PS 17, and supermarkets.

When I was a boy the area was already on the way down. The A&P closed and many of the old tenements were abandoned and sank into ruin. In the later 70's the school burned down (though there was already another school nearby). The Richmond Terrace Public Houses had gone from being a diverse working class bastion to a place where the hardworking tenants were force to live cheek by jowl with individuals of the least reputable sort.

Now the area has achieved a stasis. In the early 80's I watched several blocks of old building be torn down and replaced with little attached homes. The commercial strip of Jersey Street between Pauw Street and Castleton Avenue struggles on. Working class families have reclaimed many of the older homes on the streets branching off Jersey and there's been a stabilizing effect on the whole neighborhood. Despite all that, the Jersey Street environs are still a marginal place with more crime than much of the rest fo the Island and general shabbiness that never seems to go away.

Later criminals began preying on the neighborhood and

Prospect Gables Redux

Located only a few houses and across the street from the albatross that is the home I purchased two years ago and still can't live in, the Prospect Gables have clearly fallen down on their uppers. I feel like I remember seeing the Gables with their fanciful roof top adornments still intact but I could have taken crazy pills. You can clearly see the once painted patterns used to create the fake Tudor effect in the postcard picture. The old concrete stanchions are still visible at the bottom left of the picture. The lower story windows are bricked up today, probably a reminder of the neighborhood's less criminally averese days.

I still am puzzled by the postcard's existence but I'm thankful for it. These postcards (and the NYPL's easily accessible collection) will give me things to write about whenever I run out of my own trite ideas.

Postcard from New Brighton

These were real postcards printed at some distant time in Staten Island's past. Both building still exist (with modern pictures forthoming) and have suffered considerable aesthetic deterioration and their blocks have tumbled down the economic ladder a few rungs. There also continues to be no reason for the postcards to exist. Perhaps I can do little research on the history of postcards of such everyday domiciles. I mean it's cool to be able to send a painted picture of your house to friends and family but it just doesn' make any sense.

New Links

I added a bunch of new links today. The first two are the most valuable but all have good things contained within.


Forgotten New York is one of the coolest sites for pictures of the five boroughs bar none. It's creator, Kevin Walsh, has been doing hist site for ten years and recently he wrote a book called "Forgotten New York". Go to the "Street Scenes" section and check out the Staten Island articles. The man's collected some amazing things and gathered good information.

The New York Public Library Digital Collections is a great picture resource. Just enter what you'd like to see in the search and go for it. Unfortunately there's not a lot of good information attached to the pictures. Sometimes there's a note scribble onto the image or there's a caption indicating date or location but more often than not it's all a little vague.

The last two sites are similar to my own. They're personal sites with things of special interest to their creators. Nonetheless, for the interested Staten Islander they do provide a wealth of interesting pictures from across the decades. They also have their own sets of links to other Staten Island biased sites. Check them out and if you find fun sites on your own, let me know and I'll put up a link.

Old Church Building

It's still a beautiful neo-Gothic structure. There's some minor changes (the old steeple spires are missing (which is not visible in my mediocre picture) and there are windows over the bell openings), but it's still the same building from the postcard. Reading about Zion's history from there website, I discovered the building was opened in 1921. The congregation had started as a simple Norwegian Sunday school meeting in a building on Avenue B (which was just torn down) and had finally reached the point they could afford to erect a real church. Then a mere forty-three years later they moved on to the lifeless structure on Watchogue Road.

Zion Lutheran Church

I guess that Zion Lutheran moved to its present location in Westerleigh from Port Richmond in the mid sixties because they wanted a larger building and many of its parishoners had moved to that neighborhood. Whatever the reasons, who'd want to trade this beautiful gothic building for this lifeless example of modern architecture?

The old Scandinavian Lutheran Church is now St. Philip's Baptist Church and appears to be maintained in good condition. It is one of several churches in the area and one of the two directly along the park that once formed the heart of one of Port Richmond's nicer residential sections. I forgot to get a picture of the building's present condition (because I'm a dope) but I'll put that up next.

Same House - Different Picture

So here's what the house looks like today. It's a pretty little house that's been kept up rather well. You can see that the clapboard sheathing has been replaced with wider boards and the decorative trim at the top of the left hand chimney is gone but it's still a splendid reminded or Staten Island's long ago Dutch settlement.

Van Santvoord House

This cool little brick and wood house sits at the bend in Richmond Terrace at the foot of Pelton Avenue. I'll post a picture of the house at it looks today. It's still beautiful. Now, unfortunately, it's been chopped up into multi-family. What are you gonna do. At least it's still there.

Staten Island

I love Staten Island. If you know me that probably doesn't come as any sort of a surprise, but I just wanted to get it out there for anyone else bored enough to be reading this. I can't think of leaving Staten Island. I know, I know. Staten Island's a provincial, conservative town with stupid, classless people.

First, with almost half a million people it's only as provincial as you want it to be. Whatever cultural attractions we lack are simply in another borough, that is, in a different part of the city Staten Island belongs to.

Secondly, it is conservative. People who own homes, worry about earning enough money and sending the kids to school usally don't have the luxury or time to not be fairly conservative. Suits me fine.

Finally, they're really no less classy than any bohemian wannabe in Manahattan or Brooklyn. Look, we live in a pretty tacky society in general these days. For every NASCAR or wrestling fan there's some hipster going to a pompous show at PS 1. We live in a day of cheap spectacle and crazy social antipathies. If you like junk I don't it must be tasteless.

Coming on to Staten Island from any of the bridges or the ferry can still take my breath away. Masonry towers and old wooden houses brek through a seemingly endless green cover of sycamores, oaks and maples. The same vantage point shows the Island as a black space floating in front of me bound together by the yellow-orange street lights and rushing bands of car lights. I'm still moved when I look out over the borough from the crest of one of our bridges and I get just a bit excited when I can pick out a house I know between the leaves and branches that seem to be ready to smother it.

I like its houses and I like its people, even the ones I can't stand on a day to day basis. That's probably because I know I'm a bit of a jerk and I only feel superior because they don't like what I like or act just like me. I mean there's just no rational foundation for me feeling I'm any better than anybody I meet on the street and when I stop looking down my nose long enough I remember that and I can tell myself to shut the heck up.

I'm not foolish enough to think I'm anything but a product of this borough and I know I'm not "better" than the vast majority of them. Just because I think I'm smarter than so many of my fellow Staten Islanders doesn't make it even occasionally true. Everyone likes to think they're smarter or cooler than everyone around them (and everyone knows how cool I am).

These are the people I've known all my life and will probably know till the day I die. They have the same concerns for how the Island evolves and grows in the future that I do. If we don't agree on precisely how things turn out we at least all know what's important to think about.

If I was to go anywhere else I'd feel unmoored and set loose in a very discomfomrting way. It happened during my years in Albany (admittedly a small, anti-cosmopolitan outpost in New York's northlands) and I suspect it would happen wherever I moved to.

I love the tree covered hills and the evolving prairies growing on the remnants of the Fresh Kills Landfill. I love our French Provincial Borough Hall and the abandoned derelict Seaview TB hospital. I love the handful of ancient colonial homes scattered around the North Shore and old Victorian homes vainly struggling against development in Tottenville.

I'm going to start posting pictures from the Island throughout time. Some I'll snag from books and websites while the others I take with my handy little digital camera. If you have any ideas or comments please feel free to leave them and I'll see what I can do.

What I've Read

Mignola/Arcudi - BPRD: The Universal Machine
De Hartog, Jan - The Peacable Kingdom
Marshall, William L. - Yellowthread Street
Cotterill, Colin - The Coroner's Lunch
Kirk, Russell - Watcher at the Strait Gate
Rowling, J.K. - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
McWhorter, John - Authentically Black
Wangerin, Walter - The Book of the Dun Cow
McCarthy, Cormac - No Country for Old Men
Marshall, Michael - The Intruders
Bellavia, David - House to House
Pratchett, Terry - Making Money
Cook, Glen - The Fire in His Hands
Cook, Glen - With Mercy Toward None
Lindsay, Jeff - Darkly Devoted Dexter
Lindsay, Jeff - Dexter in the Dark
Cook, Glen - A Shadow of All Night Falling
Shlaes, Amity - The Forgotten Man
Erikson, Steven - Gardens of the Moon
King, Stephen - On Writing
Erikson, Steven - Deadhouse Gates
Dalrymple, Theodore - Our Culture, or What's Left of It
Long, Jeff - Deeper
Barlough, Jeffrey - Bertram of Butter Cross
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Coady, Roxanne, ed. - The Book That Changed My Life
Lermontov, Mikhail - A Hero for Our Times
Dostoevsky, Feodor - Crime and Punishment
Reeve, Philip - Larklight

A little bit of everything; non-fiction, scifi, fantasy, crime, etc. Some were very good (House to House) and some were very (very, very) bad (The Intruders and Harry Potter).

Catching Up

So I haven't written anything on this useless blog in several months. for what it's worth, since July, I've read 28 books and gotten a job. The latter had a lot to do with making the former possible.
My job is a beautiful post at the College of Staten Island. I'm employed as a college assistant and I spend my days hooking up A-V equipment for professors and getting movies off the racks for students to watch. Much of my day is spent sitting at the front desk answering phones or just waiting for my next scheduled delivery. This gives me some time to read. Enough time that I've been able to get myself back on track to the sort of scale of reading I used to do.
The job is actually very cool. My bosses are decent and, unlike some I've had in the past, look out for the staff. My coworkers are a great assortment of students and retirees. Both are taking advantage of the job's great benefits package and comfortable working conditions.
If I'm not sounding to emotional one way or the other it's because it's just a nice job that I don't dislike going to and it gives me money, healthcare and pay. At this point I don't really want to ask for more out of a job.

"Freedomland" - Richard Price

While not a sequel to "Clockers", "Freedomland", from 1998, is set in Richard Price's fictional New Jersey cities of Dempsy and Gannon. Respectively they're stand-ins for Jersey City and Bayonne with fictional room to spare.

There's still crime and drugs on the streets around the Armstrong Projects in Dempsy and their mostly black tenants but it's not like the crack era depicted in the "Clockers". In fact it's barely alluded to in "Freedomland". In the first book, black-white interaction seemed to be limited to white cops and junkies and teenage black crack dealers. flying squads of narcotics cops are constanly storming the parks and playgrounds in "Clockers" rounding up everyone they feel like. By the era of "Freedomland" that doesn't seem to be the norm anymore. The cops, instead, now exist to establish a cordon sanitaire around the projects and keep blacks out of Gannon.

"Freedomland" opens with a wounded white woman, Brenda Martin, wondering through the Armstrong Houses and into the local emergency room where she says she's just been carjacked by a black man. Eventually she also lets the interviewing detective know her four year old son, Cody, was in the back seat of her stolen car. From the moment that information is relayed to police headquarters the two cities, white Gannon and heavily black and brown Dempsy, begin moving towards an explosion in slow motion.

The inevitable disaster, and Price makes it clear from the beginning that it is inevitable, is seen through the eyes of Det. Lorenzo Council and Jesse Haus, a reporter for the Dempsy evening paper. Council is older and black and lives for the job. His range is the Armstrong Houses and he will do whatever he needs to keep things calm, help those in need and ensure that deceny is given a chance and the tenants are treated with respect. Haus is young and white, the child of communist party parents who still live in projects because moving out when they turned black would have been a racist act in their eyes. Both are drawn to Brenda by their job and become entangled in her story.

While both Council and Haus suspect that Brenda isn't telling the whole story they and the rest of the city's law enforcement apparatus and regional media have to proceed on the information at hand. Soon there is a blockade around the Armstrong Houses, long outstanding minor warrants being enforced and violent roustings being conducted. There are no surprises in the book and I think that's one of Price's goals.

We all know that there's crime in the projects, that there are struggling working people there and that most of us (by which I mean middle class educated white folks) couldn't care less.

When a cute little white kid goes missing it's bound to be the lead news story. When a cute little black kid goes missing it's going to be on a middle page of the paper. There's just too much history to point to dismiss that. It's not the cops' fault, but it is the law enforcement hierarchy and media's fault.

We live in a country where we willingly tolerate cities becoming hollowed out shells and abandoned many of the people left there when our parents and grandparents moved to the suburbs. As long as the police kept the criminals in those cities and away from our nice streets we didn't care. When moments arises like the book's plot we want an immediate military style crackdown. At some point there are bound to be explosions.

As the truth is teased out by Council, Haus and group of semi-professional missing child finders Dempsy and Gannon's clash slowly builds from a series of skirmishes to full dress battle. Over a few days and nights years of black-white tension come to what Price portrays as foregone conclusion.

While "Clockers" raced to its end, "Freedomland" moves with at a funereal pace. The book is packed (and padded) with incident and incidental characters. There's just too much. Price's prose is soul wrenching at times but it's not enough to overcome the book's ridiculous length. When the story's come to its end there's still one hundred more pages to go. Since there's no mystery he needs to give his readers more than endless repetitions of the same points and that's what the book does.

Not since "Bleak House" have I taken this long to read a book. It's not a bad book and Price's book is about things we don't talk and scream about till something's done about them. It's about the rage and devastation that lives on the periphery of our own comfortable lives and it's a story told with appropriate rage. It just doesn't have to be so long.

"Clockers" - Robert Price

One of the authors praised by Stanley Crouch in "the Artificial White Man" for examing America and race in depth, is Richard Price. Actually, he writes about Tom Wolfe, whom he praises, giving a speech in which he extolls Price for moving into Jersey City for over a year and striving to understand the place down to its sinews and guts and then producing the novel "Clockers".

Published in 1992, "Clockers" is about race, murder and drugs in Jersey City (called Dempsy in the book) in the early nineties. We see the violence and devastation through the eyes of 19-year old, ulcer ridden dealer Strike and just shy of retirement homicide detective Rocco Klein. Both are men at their limits of mental endurance and achingly striving to understand how they managed to lose control of their lives and how can they climb out of the pits they dug themselves.

Strike and Rocco have grown up, like all of us, with strongly held notions of how the world works. For years nothing they've encountered has discouraged their prejudices. When a fast food manager is murdered and it's discovered he's dealing from the restaurant things begin spinning out of control for Strike and Rocco become obsessed to the point of possibly screwing up his looming retirement.

Strike's brother, a church-going, hard working man who always does the right thing confesses to the murder. Strike can't believe his brother did it and neither can Rocco. Strike tries to find out what happened in hopes of saving his brother. Rocco too disbelieves the confession, instead believing in Strike's guilt. As the two fight their way through the streets and bureaucracy of Dempsy to discover some sort of truth we're given a deep tour of economic despair, drug abuse, racial hatred and simple police callousness.

Price writes gorgeous prose (at time a little too so) that sounds believable even when coming from dangerous thugs. Strike's boss, the mid level dealer, Rodney Little, with dreams of legitimacy while Faginishly building new teams of juvenile dealers to move his product, is one of the most disturbing villains encountered in recent realistic fiction. Rodney's manipulation of Strike is Mephistophelean.

"Clockers" exposes the war on drugs as a failure and the urban decay that robs too many American's of any sort of hope and ultimately the rest of the country of the contributions of too many of its citizens trapped in the rotten hulks of long lost cities.

"The Thanatos Syndrome" - Walker Percy

I was looking up some background on the late historian Shelby Foote and found a lote of references to his friendship with another Southern writer, Walker Percy. From there I decided to check out Walker Percy. I found a few articles and interviews with Percy that made me want to give his books a whirl. The theme he explored until his death was the creep of relativism and how it natuarally undermines a larger, societal morality.


"The Thanatos Syndrome" takes that theme to its darkest conclusion and tries to pull it apart and expose the snake coiled around its heart. At what point does abortion lead to proactive euthanasia of the disabled and elderly? When does the belief that mankind is perfectible lead to re-education camps and ultimately the ovens?

Percy's hero Dr. Tom More, a psychiatrist recently released from prison and returned to his old home in Louisiana. Beset by family problems, diminished faith and a general seething rage at the world around him he quickly finds out things seem to be getting horribly strange in his town. People are emotionally flat but sexually aggressive. Some of the same people are suddenly possessed of great calculating ability and utter geographical recall. There are also signs of child molestation at his children's private school.

Soon More realizes that his town is the center of some sort of experiment being conducted to improve mankind. If it all recalls some seventies medical thriller (like Coma, just not as boring) that was exactly Percy's goal. He hoped he could bring the issues that moved him most by deliberately creating a blockbuster style thriller. He almost succeeded.

Parts of the book are too dry and pendantic which is a shame. Percy's ideas are important and worth examinating but a times the book just slips into a little too slow a gear. Is mankind perfectible? As a Christian I of course don't think so and that's the basis of Percy's argument. He makes a strong case for what are seemingly logical outcomes from the dismissal of any sort of greater morality from human interaction. What happens when man takes it on himself to try to reform man? What doors are opened and how dark a place do they lead to?

Maybe a non-fiction work would have been bettered suited to Percy's examination of the questions he wanted raised. Unfortunately he tried to write a thriller and his skill just didn't meet the task he set himself. The action sequences are sloppy and confusing. The dialogue is too long and drawn out to be part of a potboiler and is overwritten for where it's placed.

I haven't read anything else by Percy yet but I suspect that the thriller just wasn't something he'd schooled himself in well enough to actually write a really good one. I've got some of his other books and "The Moviegoer" is always showing up on lists as one of the most important American books of the last century so I sort of feel obligated to give it a try someday.

"The Artificial White Man" - Stanley Crouch

"The Artificial White Man" is Stanley Crouch's most recent collection of essays on all things American, artistic and political. Crouch is a curmudgeonly New York writer that I first encountered twenty years ago in his arts writing for the Village Voice. I'd never read anyone who combined indignation, rage and what seemed like a heavy dose of common sense before. My own views were only starting to coalesce into traditional conservatism I tend to favor these days and finding a liberal who wasn't simply vomiting up the standard liberal lines on the arts and culture was enlightening.

I admit I also loved his thick style awash in seemingly endless trains of adjectives. Again, I'd never read a style like Crouch's up till then. I even got a subscription to the New Republic because he was listed as an associate editor at the time. Unfortunately he never wrote a piece for it during the years I got it.

Over the years as my reading scope widened I saw the verbal bloat that Crouch suffers from. I also realized that too often his essays are limited by his pugnacity and strong prejudices. I still enojyed his newspaper columns but I didn't buy his novel when it came out.

So why did I buy "The Artificial White Man"? I've come to the conclusion that I love essays. I like their succinctness and tight focus. Too much non-fiction I encounter is crushed down with minutiae that I don't care about and I can barely imagine the authors even have regards for.

I started reading the Atlantic Monthly because it features some of the best non-fiction writing I'm aware of. People like Christopher Hitchens and Sandra Tsing Loh are regular contributors. Robert Kaplan, Mark Bowden and all sorts of amazing authors regularly write great dispatches on the wars.

That's a long way of saying I'll always grab a book of essays that looks interesting when I'm in need of something new to read. Crouch's book seemed to fit the bill.

The book is a mishmash of determinedly provacative essays on white justifications and fetishizations of black social patholgies, the unwillingness of American writers to confront race (as well as anything outside of their immediate social zone) and paeans to some artists who happen to do all the things Crouch wants them to.

Can you tell I thought the book was a little too much? I mean it only cost me about $13 (thank you little beige Barnes&Noble member card - absolutely worth the $25 per annum if you buy more than three of four books a year) and he does have an interesting take on things. Race is still the monster underpinning and undermining so much of what goes on in this country these days and we don't really discuss it.