In a week it will be October, but it felt like summer at the Imagination Playground around 5 o'clock.
Daughter and I walked a half-loop around the park; we encountered a warbler (unidentified species), a saxophonist, more bread-tossing Tashlich celebrants, and a Brazilian soccer team on the Parade Grounds. We walked about 2 miles, just enough to get good and hungry for dinner. I made butternut squash flavored with sage, because, well, even at 80 degrees, it's fall.
Alright, so it's just an artwork being hauled away: Goodbye to "Erratic," a glaringly shiny pseudo-boulder that competed for attention with the luscious garden at the foot of the Litchfield Villa. For authentic artistry, I'll take Carmen, the villa's masterful volunteer gardener, over sculptor Roxy Paine. No disrespect to Mr. Paine; some of his other work is striking and beautiful, but this one left me cold. Maybe ironic "statements" about nature just don't hold up that well in bright sunshine next to the real deal.
It is May Day, and this is how things are supposed to be on May Day, even though this was actually taken yesterday. Why do they call this tree a "redbud" (Cercis canadensis), when it is a Crayola "orchid"-color-bud? (No complaints about this overcast May-Day morning, however, because it is mild out, and the wet breeze from the park smells like moss and ferns and maple sap.)
This particular "red"bud was carrying on outrageously behind the back of one of sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor's vigilant pumas. Did you know that the term for a sculptor who specializes in animals is an animalier? (It's said "animal-eer," not a Frenchified "aneemal-yay" as I'd suspected, which is why it's good to look things up.)
I'm still high on poetry from yesterday's Poem in Your Pocket Day, so heeeere's Emily:
THE SPRINGTIME’S pallid landscape
Will glow like bright bouquet,
The lilacs, bending many a year,
With purple load will hang;
The bees will not forget the time
The rose will redden in the bog,
Her everlasting fashion set,
Till summer folds her miracle
When sacrament is done.
Emily Dickinson
He looks as if he's saying, "Good Lord, where did that come from?" That was my response upon finally noticing this statue of Major General Gouverneur Kemble Warren right opposite the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket.
And what drew my eye was not Warren, but this lovely backdrop of forsythia and daffodils...
...framed above by chartreuse tree clusters and below by these charming dandelion-like guys.
"Everything with him was subordinated to duty," states the plaque beneath the statue. G.K. Warren led Union troops heroically at Gettysburg (where he saved Little Round Top) and a half-dozen other major battles. But Warren spent the rest of his distinguished postwar career trying to rehabilitate his reputation after being relieved of his command late in the Civil War. (Warren, an engineer, had been criticized as overly cautious and deliberate.) It took until 1879 for a court of inquiry to exonerate Warren--and the results were not published until after his death in 1882. Warren died in Newport, Rhode Island, and was buried there at his own request in civilian clothes and without military honors.
The best view of the statue is from behind; from here, Warren appears to glower directly at the Quadriga atop the Grand Army Plaza arch, erected to the glory of the Union defenders he led bravely, if not boldly enough for the brass of his time.
Warren's decades-long tale of overshadowed glory, along with his flinty determination and engineer's attention to detail, find an echo in the life story of his baby sister, Emily. You may have heard of her; she married one of Warren's engineering staffers, a chap named Washington Roebling.
Since Warren was responsible for their introduction, perhaps he should be turned around 180 degrees to gaze toward a certain bridge.
BOB GUSKIND MEMORIAL 'ADOPTABLE CUTIE OF THE WEEK'
Since I didn't recruit a Greenmarket Dog of the Week this weekend, I'd like to introduce something even better: An adoptable dog of the week! The recently lost and much-missed Brooklyn blogger Robert Guskind used to do this feature on his Gowanus Lounge blog, and I felt compelled by Natasha the Pug, a Craigslist cutie, to take up the banner at least once. According to Windsor Terrace-based New York Animal Rescue:
Natasha is a ten year old Pug...she is spayed, dewormed, treated with
Revolution to prevent fleas, ticks, ear mites and heartworm and is up
to date with vaccinations. She is very friendly and gets along really
well with kids. Her adoption fee is $200.00 and she'll get one free
exam at our vet's office, one free month of pet health insurance and a
microchip. If you'd like to adopt Natasha please email us at
nyanimalrescue@yahoo.com for an adoption application.
As the godmother of a middle-aged lady pug, I can assure you that life with Natasha will involve a big payback of snuffly adoration for the care and love you give her!
My second non-Prospect Park dalliance yesterday was Madison Square Park. It's a nexus of weird history, Manhattan's and my own family's, and I contemplated it while shambling around sucking on a caramel shake (or, as I call it, "heroin"), from the park's own legendary Shake Shack.
The Ballad of Mother Met (A Madison Avenue Rag)
Ah, memories swirl around the Met Life tower (now getting the finger from that bizarre sliver condo-under-construction on 23rd Street). Some member of my family has toiled for "Mother Met" on and off from the dirty Thirties through the go-go Eighties, eating a furtive lunch in Madison Square Park under the glaring eye of the great clock to avoid serfdom in the company cafeteria (with its free "dinner" at lunchtime). My mother left high school a few months before graduation to work in their loan department at the depths of the Great Depression in support of her fatherless family. She got $13 for a six-day work week as a file clerk, prying through folders full of sad stories of men who drained their life insurance policies just to survive.
Each morning, she passed jobless men selling apples in the park; all her life, she recalled how she couldn't meet their eyes. (And we think we have it rough now.) In the Seventies, my dad, a field agent, took a job in the home office, and so did Spouse for an ill-fitted few years before he found his niche in the wacky world of non-profits. And here also was my first paying job, as a temp in data entry. I spent the summer of my 16th year typing in long lists of U.S. Steel employees and their dependents, and skirted the park because its splintered benches were occupied by homeless guys and reeking, mumbling bag ladies. (No Shake Shack then, but I could probably have gotten real heroin if I'd wanted it.) On my last day and last hour that August of 1974, I typed in the names of the entire family of Napoleon Bonaparte, and raced out the door into the park's hallucinatory heat in a rapture of freedom.
Yesterday, in the habit of AYITP, I took a closer look at the park, now a well-manicured oasis tended by work crews and studded with sponsorship plaques. There is a spacious dog run, although it is barren and malodorous compared to the dog paradise of Prospect Park's Long Meadow.
But amid city traffic and noise, it offers precious respite for Corgi snoodling.
At the park's northern edge, there is a damn cool monument to the guy who said (sort of), "Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!" The story of Civil War naval hero David Glasgow Farragut is incredible: He joined the navy at age 10 or so, was given charge of a ship at age 12, and was the first U.S. Admiral ever.
The sculptor was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who would have made a great Oscar-night dress designer judging from these windswept sea-goddesses. The architect was Stanford White, who was shot to death across the street at the old Madison Square Garden by the jealous millionaire husband of his mistress, the ravishing Evelyn Nesbit. And the crab plaque in yesterday's entry is inlaid at the base of it all.
So many parks, so little time.
Under appropriately mournful skies, I visited Green-Wood Cemetery, the Necropolis of Greater Parkopolis, this afternoon for a talk by Peter Quinn, whose historical novel Banished Children of Eve I'm enjoying. The lecture was here in their jewel-box of a chapel.
I skipped the trolley tour of famous dead people that followed, opting instead to traverse Green-Wood on foot with map in hand.
At left, he's not on the map of celebrity residents, but should be: James S.T. Stranahan, the "Father of Prospect Park." I profiled him here last year on AYITP. His funeral cortege wound through the park before arriving here to lay the great man to rest in his 90th year. One of the family's markers surrounding the central monument reads simply, "Infant Daughter."
The isolation and unearthly peace of Green-Wood (even with occasional tootlings by the trolley) were profound. Despite this angel's reminder, my endless weekend to-do list seemed distant and irrelevant.
Having entered through the Gothic gate on Fifth Avenue, I emerged at the "Addams Family" brownstone house on Fort Hamilton Parkway. There, I took a closer look at the handsome little gatehouse that we've passed so often in the car.
It turns out that this mansard-roofed dollhouse is Brooklyn's niftiest comfort station: men on the left, ladies on the right, and a small "lounge" with a life-size soldier statue in the center. And, lest you freshen up without some Victorian moral uplift, there are three charming reliefs showing life's brief hourglass running down, from carefree youth (with allegorical squirrel)...
through hard-working adulthood (as a surveyor or draftsman?)...
...to weary old age.
After all these memento mori, I found myself wondering what epitaph I'd choose for myself. I decided on:
I'm still having fun
The portrait bust of Mozart in the Concert Grove sported an epaulette of snow in the weak morning sun.
He glares across the grove with as much thunder-browed stoicism as Brahms gazes back from the other side. From the few portraits of the hapless Wolfie done during his too-brief lifetime (shown here, a digitally-lightened detail from a 1777 pic), the rendering appears a bit on the heroic side, don't you think?
The
pillar beneath boasts that the statue was "presented to the
city of Brooklyn by the United German Singers of the city; first prize
at the 18th National Saengerfest held at Philadelphia, June 23rd". A saengerfest was a German cultural festival featuring choral performance smackdowns, and the winners were obviously awash in Teutonic pride. (Most of the other composer statues in the grove commemorate similar victories.)
As the granddaughter of a German classical musician, I sometimes feel wistful here, because of all our Brooklyn cultures, surely the once-massive presence of the Germans is the most thoroughly erased and forgotten. (These bronze, plinth-sitting "dead white males," once a revered tourist attraction reproduced on souvenir postcards, just seem to drive home the point.) And yet, even nostalgia is complicated if you're part German. Ah, yes, the glorious culture of the Fatherland...oh, never mind.
I climbed the little granite staircase up to Breeze Hill, where a real singer's festival was alive and well. In a tangle of shrubbery right next to the road, three of my favorite winter birds—chickadees, blue jays, and tufted titmice—were having a party.
The blue jay proved surprisingly elusive for a bird that is so big, blue and brazen. Here he peeks at me. As for the titmice, forgetaboutit; they are tiny, grey, and very fast.
What's better than one chickadee? Two chickadees!
When Daughter was little, she invented superhero personalities for these bronze panthers (sometimes called pumas) that majestically guard the Third Street entrance to Prospect Park. They look especially fine against the russet backdrop of autumn leaves, and have been delighting children of all ages since their installation in 1898.
Their sculptor, Alexander Phimister Proctor, called himself "Sculptor in Buckskin" and loved bagging animals on hunting trips out West almost as much as he enjoyed sculpting them. His descendants have created a quirky-sounding Proctor museum in the state of Washington.
Image: A. Phimister Proctor Museum
For a switch to earthbound contemporary sculpture, stroll a few yards over to the Litchfield Villa, where a shiny steel lump hunkers on the lawn. This is "Erratic" by Roxy Paine, a Brooklyn sculptor (born in 1966) who also does stainless-steel trees, elaborate fake installations of plants and fungi, and art-making "machines." According to the art in the parks site, "In geology, the term 'erratic' refers to a rock
that has been carried by a glacier hundreds of miles away from its original
geographic location. Erratic’s slick exterior leaves its origin unexplained. It
is a boulder displaced from somewhere between a mountain and a steel factory.
The work reflects the artist’s interest in the interactions between humans and
nature and specifically from Paine’s examination of nature through the lens of
industrial processes." (I'm glad they cleared that up for me.)
I'd enjoy hearing a conversation between Proctor and Paine, wouldn't you?
At the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, Saturday was a pumpkin-painting extravaganza.
There was actual produce for sale; we got Mars blue grapes, a slab of albacore tuna for supper, and this delicate red mustard called "Ruby Streaks."
But before long, we were again distracted by artists—this time, some guys out on a "Sketch Crawl." It's a worldwide drawing event, with an online community to share the results.
"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college—that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘You mean they forget?'" — Howard Ikemoto, artist and teacher
GREENMARKET DOG POL OF THE WEEK
Several dogs intrigued me this morning, but all were shy when approached. Never a problem for New York's press-conference-loving Senator Charles Schumer, who posed willingly with his daughter (who must be used to this sort of thing). Chuck must have spent a lot of time at the beach this summer; he was wearing shorts and had a striking sock tan.
I don't think we're quite at "peak" yet (for you foliage trackers), but the sumac leaves were on fire in the late sun that lay across the Peninsula.
Near the lake, gold is interlayered with green.
Along the shore, a young artist named Carrie-Ann Bracco allowed me to peek over her shoulder.
Nice work in progress. (Carrie's body of work explores something very different, which fascinates me: the emotional power of interior lighting.)
Here is the scene that inspired her.
Speaking of art, this weekend on the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour, you can visit the studios of two artists whose Prospect Park paintings have been featured here on AYITP: Michael Sorgatz and Ella Yang (along with dozens of others). Need more art beyond Greater Parkopolis? No problem; this is Brooklyn, after all. The vibrant work of artist Karen Friedland is enlivening the walls of the Connecticut Muffin on Cortelyou Road in Ditmas Park through Oct. 27 (her Moroccan-themed show will wake you up faster than your coffee), and evocative pictures by photographer/storyteller Mary Pat Kane are on display at the BWAC fall art show in Red Hook through Oct. 26 (Wall #187).
BONUS: NUDE DESCENDING A SWAMP?
Er, no, but when I first peered across the park lake, I thought, Whoa, naked person! On closer zoom inspection, it turned out to be a well-muscled lady in a very small bikini, who was swaying in front of a lawn chair as if transfixed by the sun. It is expected to be cooler by Friday.
