Objects

On the Run by Leah Umansky

They were part of something larger and escaped. They somehow made it down the Belt and down the main drag of Surf Avenue.  Lefty wanted in on the action; Righty wanted to run and hide.  Unarmed, and trying to communicate, they went eastward into the Land of Dreams. Passing  Steeplechase, and The Wonder Wheel, Lefty said to Righty, “ I want thrill.”  Then, Righty said to Lefty, “but we’re on the run and I miss her voice and her lips.”

In the beached, they gurgled in the sea-mist and thought about the world as a place.  They  wanted to challenge  the encased. They felt quirked and swayed and associative:  If sea   then waves. If sun-licked   then frothed.   If adrift   then swallowed.

They thought of God in this steepled place among The Clowned, The Sidewinders and The Freaks. Righty felt speechless under their umbrella’s shade, but gained strength in his gestures, “Look, I’m going to say something wrong now, She is getting between us.”  (Lefty felt it, too).  “I’m telling you, a way to say it is to look in the holes.”

So they rolled onto their rounder sides and peered into the mollusk holes in the sand.  Righty pushed Lefty and Lefty flung himself  into the sea. He never looked back, just forward, into the deep.

Righty saw him doing the Back Stroke. Saw his gossamer dip and swirl. Then, saw him befriending the Kelp and thought well, HMPH!  There are ways to control this banditry, thought Righty.  I will germinate here, on this lip of shore. I will call out to the nested, and find my way back to the Road.

It grew hot.   Righty felt he needed to reframe the situation. He booked a room at the motel. Ate a hot dog and sauerkraut. After all,  he thought,

                                                                                                the world is my oyster.   

 

About the Author

Leah Umansky is a New Yorker by birth, a teacher by choice, and an anglophile at heart. Her first book, “Domestic Uncertainties,” is floating around contest piles and hoping for someone to say, “yes!” She received her BA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton and her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She has contributed to the BOMB Magazine and Best American Poetry blogs and reviewed poetry for The Rumpus. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Contemporary Verse 2, Cream City Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. She blogs at iammyownheroine.com and is the host and curator of COUPLET: A Poetry and Music Series on NYC’s Lower East Side.

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Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 Authors, Body of Water, Coney Island, Leah Umansky, Objects, Silicone Breasts Comments Off

Obscura Day 2012 Participant Pictures

More than sixty people joined us on an exploration of New Dorp and Cedar Grove Beaches on Staten Island’s eastern shore. Here are some of the photographs from that day!

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Obscura Day photos by Dan Selzer.

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Obscura Day photos: learning history from Jen Fitzgerald and Josh Jakob.

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Obscura Day photos by Aimee Monko.

Also be sure to click over to the blog We Heart NY and to BK Rabblerouser to see more great documentation of the event.

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Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 Cedar Grove Beach, Lower New York Bay, New Dorp Beach, St. John's Guild Children's Hospital, STREAM Comments Off

A Brief History of New Dorp and Cedar Grove Beaches

Standing on New Dorp Beach, among the sea glass, the tampon applicators, the Gatorade bottles, it is possible to see remnants of the St. John’s Guild Children’s Hospital. Built in the late 19th century as a stationary counterpart to the Floating Hospital that once docked just off-shore, the institution was also known by a more romantic name: Seaside Hospital. There are metal pipes, the bases of columns, cracked bits of foundation, bricks. There is the breeze, recalling the fresh-air initiative that sought to give sick city-dwelling children a respite from their crowded tenements. And there is the sea.

But, abandoned after a brief tenure housing Italian POWs after the Second World War, knocked down to make way for a never-realized Robert Moses highway, the hospital is more ghost than anything.

Trudging across its now-littered footprint onto adjacent Cedar Grove Beach, the sand brightens, the space widens and history draws closer. For nearly one hundred years, generations of families summered in the idyllic bungalows of the Cedar Grove Beach Club until, for the sake of that phantom highway, their property was seized by the city under eminent domain. Rather than return the homes when its plans didn’t materialize, the city turned the bungalows over to the Parks Department. Residents leased them back, caring for the beach and nurturing their summer community, until, for reasons unknown, they were evicted in 2010.

The historic homes languish behind a chain link fence, boarded up, just beyond reach. HBO’s Boardwalk Empire filmed in one, and the beach, untouched by any official parks maintenance, remains clean due only to the efforts of HBO. As the homes begin to be stripped, former residents worry that proper precautions aren’t being taken against asbestos and lead. They remember the sofas, bed-frames and wind-chimes they left behind, the cabins largely emptied of mementos accumulated over decades. They remember the families that had for generations made this place a home together each summer. The former residents of Cedar Grove Beach Club still gather elsewhere for events and celebrations, still hope to win back what’s left of these buildings and rebuild their homes. But it is not hard to imagine that, before long, the well-loved slats, shingles, and beams of these bungalows will follow Seaside Hospital into the Lower Bay, drifting out of time and into memory.

 

-adapted from information given by Jen Fitzgerald, David Young, Josh Jakob and Eleanor Dugan, Obscura Day 2012.

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Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 Cedar Grove Beach, New Dorp Beach, St. John's Guild Children's Hospital, STREAM Comments Off

Fresh Air for the Poor

The New York Times, September 1, 1901

Nearly half a century has elapsed since the first fresh-air charity was instituted in New York by a kind-hearted editor who pitied the waifs playing about City Hall Park in sweltering midsummer days, whose little blistered feet might now run upon the cool grass beside them.

But for the saving help of the many fresh-air agencies in this city thousands of little ones would have perished during the recent hot wave which dealt suffering and death in unsparing measure in the crowded tenement districts of the city.

Nearly all the large churches in Manhattan conduct fresh-air charities for the poor of their districts, some for two weeks, some for the Summer, others for a day, but the burden of such work falls on the Children’s Aid Society, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, St. John’s Guild, St. Vincent de Paul Society, the Mont Lawn Home, Edgewater Creche and Gilbert Robertson Memorial Home. The great work of these associations is supplemented by many smaller ones, and the work of each rendered more effectual and far-reaching by co-operation made possible by the Charity Organization Society.

The Secretary of this association stated that during the hot spell not half his invitations to go to Bath Beach were accepted. The poor people were too prostrated by the heat to come for their tickets and make the journey thither. Mr. Brace of the Children’s Aid Society, on the contrary, was besieged by pale-faced, suffering children eager to go to Brace Farm for two weeks, and so distressing was their condition that the little ones were sent without regard to the adequacy of accommodations at the farm, and allowed to sleep in barns, out-houses, and anywhere about the house. Everything was cool, clean, and comfortable. Barns were like glimpses of paradise to the poor little waifs from east side sweat boxes. › Continue reading

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Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 Lower New York Bay, New Dorp Beach, Objects, St. John's Guild Children's Hospital, STREAM Comments Off
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