May 19, 2007 - A Walkabout in Manhattan

May 19, 2007 - A Walkabout in Manhattan

It’s ten minutes before four o’clock on May 19, 2006. I’m sitting in the Buckingham Hotel on West 57th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. The day is overcast with periods of light rain. We had left the hotel early this morning after an in-room breakfast of donuts and coffee (for me) and tea (for my wife IM). Our quest was to pick up tickets for the musical “Curtains” at the Al Hirshfeld Theater on West 44th Street near 8th Avenue and to visit the exhibition of photographs by photographer Stephen Shore at the International Center of Photography at 1114 Avenue of the Americas. Along the way we remind ourselves to find a Wells Fargo Bank ATM to keep from paying the fees for withdrawals from another bank’s ATM.

We exited the Buckingham and head a few steps east on 57th to 6th Avenue then turn south for a block to where we were confronted with a street faire that had closed 6th Avenue to vehicular traffic along its length from 56th south beyond 44th Avenue—as far as IM and I would venture today. We joined the crowd ambling down the busy thoroughfare that would otherwise be teaming with a continuous stream of traffic. Our progress was interrupted by traffic signals that enabled cross-town traffic to traverse the closed off main south-to-north one-way artery. Lining the broad boulevard were street vendors serving an array of foods of the kind found in abundance on the streets of the city any day of the week. These vendors now congregated along Avenue of the Americas. The smells fought for the attention of your olfactory glands, while the barkers at various booths attacked our tympanic membrane, and the makeshift and professionally-made signage screamed at your eyes: “free samples of kettle corn!” “Fresh-made Gyros!” “New York souvenirs!”…

It’s overcast and the temperature is somewhere between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I have my Panasonic digital video camera recording our slow amble down the Avenue of the Americas. I’m trying to record the stream of pedestrians coming toward us as we walk to capture the essence of the scene. It’s as if the skyscrapers along 6th Avenue were a block of houses belonging to wealthy homeowners and they had sealed off the street running in front of their homes for a combination block party and yard sale. And all the neighborhoods around came streaming in to celebrate and buy the proffered goods. Viewed from the upper floors of any one of the skyscrapers along the broad thoroughfare, the sea of humanity that streamed along this massive boulevard appeared as insignificant as a trail of ants. In the midst of this teaming crowd, IM and I felt as insignificant as a couple of marching workers in a long steam of others making their way to and from their colony.

We reach 44th Street and we turn right heading toward time square and the theaters beyond. It’s started to drizzle as we make our way through the light pedestrian traffic running between the avenues. Umbrellas have sprouted up among some on-coming amblers, but we carry on relying on our water-resistant jackets to ward off the light sprinkles. Crossing Times Square we are enveloped by an ocean of humanity spilling off the sidewalks and onto the streets. Our ears are assaulted by a cacophony of horns from the traffic in the street and the sound of conversations from the thousands of people surrounding us as we stream across this heavily congested intersection. Some are talking loudly to one another and others are screaming into cell phones. Add to the sound of human voices is the amplified recorded music blaring from storefronts and passing cars. Mix this with the smell of food wafting from pizza parlors, hamburger shops, the scent of humanity pressed close together, and the odors wafting off the concrete and asphalt and your senses are completely overwhelmed. Now I know how the wildebeest feels as they ford a stream with predators laying in wait for the weak to fall.

We pass beyond Time Square winding our way among clusters of people assembling in front of theaters as we head toward 8th Avenue from Broadway: the Belasco for Journey’s End, The Shubert for Spamalot, the Majestic for Phantom of the Opera, the Broadhurst for Le Miserables, and the Helen Hayes for Xanadu. By the time we reach 8th Avenue, we realize we have come too far south and need to walk up 8th to 45th Street turn right to reach the Al Hirschfeld Theatre where we retrieve the tickets for the matinee performance of Curtains on Sunday.

First objective accomplished, we continue east on 45th Street heading back to Avenue of the Americas in search of the International Center of Photography. We turn right on Avenue of the Americas retracing our steps to 44th Street. Just beyond on the right we arrive at our destination, enter the building at 1133 Avenue of the Americas, pay for our senior-discounted tickets and proceed into the museum. I say museum because the interior was a simple maze leading off to the right after you enter with nothing in the center of any of the walled off sections. The walls on the inside of the maze are lined with photos at eye level.

The exhibition we first encounter comprises photographs of notable African Americans under the title “Let your Motto be Resistance: African American Portraiture from 1865 to the Present.” Photos on display are from a variety of different photographers, some anonymous. The photographers—James VanDerZee, Berenice Abbott, Edward Weston, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, and Carl Van Vechten—are not known to me. But, the subjects they photographed are major figures in black history, from Sojourner Truth and Marion Anderson to Martin Luther King, the poet Langston Hughes, the writer James Baldwin, and Nat King Cole to name but a few.

The second exhibition and the one that bought us to the museum is entitled “The Biological Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore 1968-1993.” The images are compelling because they cast light on the everyday things in life, a street scene in downtown El Paso, Texas, where I grew up and IM and I were married, a dirt road in the town of Presidio, Texas, where my mother and father often visited their favorite priest Father Benito, transferred to the town south and east of El Paso from Our Lady of Assumption Catholic Church in El Paso, where he tended his flock long enough to convert my father from Southern Baptist to Catholic—no mean feat. A room full of additional photographs in the collection showed other place he had visited on a road trip across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a sort of Jack Kerouac in photos. There is somber melancholy exuded by each of the images captured on paper, perhaps because they picture life out of the mainstream of the popular culture that suggest mainstream America. Perhaps the images, all strikingly beautiful, reflect the photographer’s own sense of alienation and melancholy, clearly visible in the artist’s own self-portrait.

The museum had two other collections, one devoted to the photographs of Amelia Earhart and the other to the photographs of Crum. The first collection were of interest because IM and I grew up in the era immediately after the famed aviatrix met her untimely death, attempting a round the world flight, a handsome woman taking on a man’s challenge long before women were considered capable of such feats. I often thought she resembled Charles Lindberg in appearance, an female version of the Spirit-of-St-Louis hero. I wonder why pop culture icons that bend gender are attractive to both sexes. She was the one of the few who defied the conventional wisdom of the place of women in a male dominated world, perhaps another reason for the fascination she held for the multitude. The fact that she was photographed constantly and her image appearing in magazine articles, print advertisements, and newsreel footage also contributed to her fascination by the masses. Finally, that she died young and the remaining images are freeze frames such as those on these walls of an attractive young woman captured in time contributes to her mystic.

Our journey back in time complete, we resume our walk about Manhattan midtown on a overcast Saturday afternoon.