I am fOIS In The City, that crazy Italian girl from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, who has a singular obsession with NYC’s varied people and neighborhoods.
Please join me on my travels through the sights and sounds of my city; enjoy her beauty and hear her song.
New York is one of a dozen cities in the United States that cannot be enjoyed or experienced while taking a leisurely Sunday drive. Most of us prefer to ride the rails, take cross-town buses or hail a cab, after which we “walk around.”
Up and down the streets and avenues from the Island of Manhattan to the tip of South Brooklyn, her boroughs are connected with a series of ferries, bridges and tunnels and like the arteries and veins in the human body, pulse the life’s blood of people and traffic in every direction the eye can see.
(Photography for this page and many of my posts are taken from my daughter’s photo blog and her Flickr pages. Several City Scapes feature her photography as she roams the streets as well as other photographers I have found on various blogs and web pages.)
City Scapes is my way of taking you on a “walk about” along those streets and avenues. From the hills of Inwood Park, to The Radio City Music Hall and the winding cobblestones of China Town, she is worth the time and the shoe leather.
I hope that one day you will visit or you could enjoy one of my posts from City Scapes.
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A Walk Through The Neighborhood of China Town:
Lifted from another time, there is no other place in The City whose sights, sounds and aromas come close to the mystery of Chinatown. You will find her between Little Italy and the lower east side, skirting the southern tip of Manhattan.
Her narrow, cobblestone streets wind around from one intriguing shop to the next. Ducks, plucked, roasted a bright red and hanging upside down in shop windows, small basement restaurants, dim sum parlors and specialty stores, the mystique and incomprehensible individuality of the culture fascinate those who visit there. (Continue)
Back To Sunset Park:
This is the steeple of St. Michael’s Church. Like the park, the church was part of our lives for decades. From all three of us receiving First Holy Communion, to my wedding, Michael’s Baptism and Communion, until the last time, my mother, Mary Fois’ funeral mass and my niece, Laura singing Amazing Grace.
Sitting in the circle by the flag pole, watching the sun setting in the bay, the steeple rises like a beacon, showing us the way home. (Continue)
City Scapes:
In my original Ramblings journal, I wrote from a huge solid oak desk that took up an entire wall of our small, one bedroom apartment. We moved in the winter of 1973 and left in the winter of 1978. Those five years were for me, the most magical years of my life.
For five years I sat at my desk with my Royal manual typewriter, the kids in the background, in an apartment building built like a steel fortress in which dozens of kids played in the halls and each other’s apartments. No one locked doors, no one cared if the kid from the third floor was a pain in the ass, or if the two little ones on the first floor would ever pipe down. (Continue)
News From The City … The Brooklyn Bridge:
She takes us to work when subways strike, leads the way home during the Great Black Out, provides a wide walk-way where we can stroll, jog or bike while the river breezes whisper in our ears. She is a lovely lady and it doesn’t matter what day or night you see her, like any other lady, she’ll dazzle you with a new color, another angle and … (Continue)
Salute To Central Park:
As part of my ongoing series “City Scapes,” today I feature a great New York landmark, a proud national treasure and a wonderful place to visit with your family.
Central Park brings back memories of my children at the ages of one and three, Jen at one and Mike at three traveled by subway with me and three or four other kids to walk in different parts of the park on Sunday afternoons when no traffic is allowed.
Straight from the wilds of southern New Jersey and South Brooklyn, they were new urban dwellers who each week revelled in the splendor of the different sites and the interesting people populating the park. From the roller-bladers weaving in and around other skaters or bikers, to the talented artists and mimes, the park comes alive with the diverse culture of the city. (Continue)
Shifting Moods Of A Neighborhood:
It is always at the change of the seasons I become melancholy and miss the shifting moods of the city, the amazing transformations of the parks and the magical blend of concrete, asphalt and nature, conspiring to create a magnificent mosaic of colors.
I went looking for pictures of my old haunts, the touchstones of my past, and the mile markers of my sojourn here on planet earth.
At a high point in Manhattan, sit the hills of Inwood Park, winding their way down to the channel that separates the Harlem River from the Hudson River. The base of the hills are banked by the small, quaint neighborhoods of Spytan Dyvil, Marble Hill and the serpentine roads of Riverdale on one side and Inwood, the Baker’s Field of Columbia’s football team and the parks on the other. (Continue)
So Long Frank Lloyd Wright … Bush Terminal:
The docks and the Bush buildings remained for decades, abandoned like unwanted children, only to become the center of controversy. The center of a zoning battle to restrict the number of stories the developers can build. The original plans would have blocked the beautiful vistas from Sunset Park and Owl’s Head Park. The vista along the Narrows that stretches from downtown Brooklyn, adjacent to the Belt Parkway, under the Narrows Bridge and moving out to sea. (Continue)
The Park At Sunset:
Sunset Park from Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue, from Forty-First Street to Forty-Fourth Street with its handball courts, huge pools and sloping hills.
It was here I loved to come for the namesake of the park, to watch the sun setting over the rooftops of the houses, the factories, heading down the long hills into the waters of the Narrows.
To sit in peace and watch the rose pinks and purples of the sun as it moved closer to the horizon. (Continue)
New York City Street Games:
There was a special on our local Public Broadcasting Station last week about “NYC street games,” ninety wonderful minutes about growing up in New York City during the fifties. Those times before locked doors and arranged play dates, the world before Game Boy and cell phones, the magic years of my childhood.
There are things that only children who grew up on the streets of New York know. No one ever locked their door. So if you had to make a “pit stop,” you simply called out … Mrs. Perez I have to go. No questions asked.
It didn’t matter if the neighbors were Irish, Italian, Polish or Puerto Rican. It never mattered that we went to school with the youngest of the Lee family, whose laundry off Fifth Avenue did our father’s blue-collar shirts, while mom worked the late shift at the factory or dad came in early from the docks. (Continue)
Retro Day … (The building of the Narrows Bridge and The Word Trade Center:
Two major changes in the five boroughs took place while I was growing up in New York. The construction of the longest bridge and the tallest building in the world!
This past weekend was the anniversary of 9/11.
I wasn’t in New York and was one of millions who sat horrified watching as the planes hit the buildings. It took hours before the reality sunk in, hours for me to realize, this was not a stunt, not a film, no one would yell cut and turn off the cameras for the day.
It played out in real-time, and it is still painful to talk about it.
Instead, I’ll talk about what was on ground zero before that day. The best second-hand book stores, record stores and all around bargain stores in lower Manhattan. My mother-in-law worked for the Federal Reserve and spent at least three of her lunch hours every week picking up the amazing bargains at a store called “The Pushcart.” (Continue)
Seasons in The City:
My home for over fifty years is a place where the world stands still and all things and people come to it.
A place where over one-hundred and fifty language groups live and work and open restaurants on the East Side of Manhattan.
I learned very early that living in New York means you can travel all around the world and never go further than the next subway platform. It’s easy. Jump on a cross town bus, take a subway, cab or hop on a bike. (Continue)
The Museum Mile …
Join me on a walking tour of Manhattan’s Museum Mile, one of the most culturally diverse stretches of concrete and asphalt in the United States, and if my French and Italian relatives would please excuse my inflated ego, second to none anywhere on the planet.
Along a route, which is actually two blocks longer than one mile, natives and visitors can visit sites of both old and new, traditional and modern, in a display of art that feeds the hungry soul and dazzles the eye. (Continue)
