New York is open.
The Department of Sanitation emailed me a waiver last Saturday warning of “inherent risks in participating, including the risk of serious bodily injury or death,” which is always a very promising sign when it comes to tours of mysterious facilities. The particular facility in question was the Roosevelt Island AVAC plant. The island, a two-mile-long strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, was once home to a smallpox hospital and was redeveloped in the 1970s into a residential community of apartment towers. Today, it is home to some 15,000 people.
There is a lot that is unique about Roosevelt Island. It is, for example, the only place in New York accessible by an aerial tramway — a special cablecar high over the East River whose passengers can enjoy the view for just $2.75. It also features — quite uniquely for New York — a conspicuous lack of garbage sitting on the street awaiting collection (though His Honor the Mayor has set McKinsey and Company on the task for the rest of the city and after they have spent $4 million inventing garbage bins, we are told, the issue will be just a few RFPs away from a citywide solution).
On Sunday morning, following a journey by bus, aerial tramway, and another bus, I was greeted outside of the AVAC facility with a leaflet entitled “Why There’s No Curbside Garbage Collection on Roosevelt Island,” the title printed in the Department of Sanitation’s classic green Helvetica. The secret? Automatic Vacuum Assisted Collection — AVAC. The shared mission of the dozen-or-so lucky strangers assembled outside the AVAC plant: spend an hour learning absolutely everything about it.
This scene — or something like it — was repeated hundreds of times across the five boroughs last weekend as part of Open House New York. From parks to public housing to midtown offices to Staten Island historic homes, more than 250 sites across the city were open to the public. Some, like the AVAC plant, required winning tickets in a lottery. All were free.
Among the chosen winners of the AVAC tour lottery, the excitement was terrific. It was a group composed of civil servants, architects, and generally curious people, all of whom were greeted at the front door of the plant by a mild garbage smell and a man with a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and a thick New York accent. An operating engineer and sixteen-year veteran of the AVAC system, he was to lead the tour and explain the process by which the refuse of 15,000 residents was sucked from the basements of their apartment buildings into a mighty central collection facility at sixty miles per hour.
“You’ve all signed the waiver, right?” he asked, glancing toward a small pool of brown liquid on the otherwise surprisingly clean floor as he lead us into the room with the vacuum motors. The tour included everything. We visited the motors in the basement (“these new ones are more efficient, which I guess is nice if you’re into that kind of thing”). We visited the control room in a glass box high above the operation. We looked at (and smelled) a container packed with four days of garbage. We watched the system run and heard the sound of a building’s Sunday morning garbage knocking around in a giant funnel. We got laundry recommendations for removing the smell and applauded an engineer who recently learned that he is going to have a child.
Then came question time. What’s the worst day for garbage on Roosevelt Island? (Thanksgiving.) Can you get sucked down your garbage chute if you open it at the wrong time? (No, that’s not how it works.) What if it gets clogged? (Send the guys down there and have them poke around.) What’s the worst clog you’ve seen? (A twin mattress can’t fit through a 22-inch tube.)
One of the final questions: What happens to the trash when the container is full? This, for the first time, stumped our guide. “A sanitationman comes and takes it on a truck. It goes away — over the bridge — to Virginia or something? I know they used to just incinerate it somewhere.”
This is the magic of so many interesting things in New York. They exist in their own tiny world in a great city. They are maintained by brilliant people who know their corner inside and out — operating engineers, park rangers, architects, superintendents, historians, and so forth. Even if they don’t know what happens to the garbage when they’re done with it, they know every inch of the process that gets it to them.
These people — people who know their stuff and devote their life to places and things worth caring about — are half the fun of Open House New York. It is a pleasure to climb a water tower, visit an oil tanker, or see a garbage vacuum in action. Even more pleasurable is the opportunity to meet the people running the show in those places.
Take, for example, the City’s Urban Park Rangers, who spent two afternoons last weekend showing visitors to the top of the Highbridge Water Tower in Washington Heights. 200 feet above the park below, I spoke to one of them who, after a career as a teacher and high school principal in California, got a master’s degree in environmental education and a job as an Urban Park Ranger in New York. He spends his days connecting the people of Manhattan to the hidden gems of their parks. (His best fall recommendations for New Yorkers: The caves at Inwood Hill Park and the Dyckman Farmhouse).
Twelve miles and a borough away in Red Hook, Brooklyn (a neighborhood noted for its impossible-to-reach IKEA and extraordinary key lime pie), sits the Mary A. Whalen, a decommissioned oil tanker launched in 1938. As boats go, the Mary A. Whalen is terribly interesting. A landmark Supreme Court case concerning lighthouses and liability earned the boat a place on the National Register of Historic Places. Its engine is made of cast iron. Its galley stove burns diesel and, last Sunday afternoon was occupied in the heating of spiced cider for the OHNY volunteers assigned to the boat, myself among them.
Just as fascinating as the boat are the people engaged in its maintenance and programming: liberal arts graduates who have, for more than a decade, devoted their efforts not just to the boat but to connecting New Yorkers to the harbor that makes New York what it is. So great is their devotion to the project that they spent the worst of Hurricane Sandy ten years ago sleeping onboard.
Last Sunday, though drizzly, was a decidedly more peaceful affair, and the OHNY volunteers, the boat experts, and various visitors spent the afternoon hanging around, talking about the mixing of pigments in maritime paint, the electrical conductivity of brass, the process of dismantling a cast iron engine, and the politics of maintaining pier space as a non-profit in New York. At one point, a group of architecture students visiting from Oklahoma for Open House weekend found themselves suddenly interrogated by the locals on their Open House experience and their class project to redesign the much-maligned Port Authority Bus Terminal.
You can see the Manhattan skyline from the deck of the Mary A. Whalen. The skyline is the sort of thing that a person would expect to be a highlight for an Open House weekend celebrating the power of place. It is the culmination of incredible technological advances in the built environment. It is full of a million secrets. It is not the highlight. It is a backdrop for people.
Specifically, last Sunday, it was a backdrop for a variation of one of New York’s most popular and timeless activities: sitting around, drinking hot spiced cider from a diesel stove, and kvetching with strangers about how someone really should do something about all of the garbage on the street.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
Edward Hopper’s New York on view at the Whitney through March 5.
I cannot name another art exhibition that I have anticipated or enjoyed as much as Edward Hopper’s New York, which I had the pleasure of visiting on Saturday afternoon. Hopper has long been a favorite of mine — a print of Nighthawks, purchased at a Kalamazoo College poster sale, was poster-puttied to the wall of several of the rooms I occupied in Trowbridge Hall. The friend with whom I visited had printed the very same work (art students have notably better access to color printers than those in the social sciences) and hung it on her wall in college as well, a connection we made midway through the gallery.
Nighthawks was perhaps the only gap in the exhibit’s coverage (it is, for readers in Chicago, on view at the Art Institute there). Otherwise, an enormous body of Hopper’s work — everything from rough sketches to iconic paintings to his collection of theatre ticket stubs is on view. Perhaps the most delightful surprise is a small collection of letters bitterly exchanged between Hopper and parks commissioner Robert Moses.
Edward Hopper’s works are the painted, quintessentially New York equivalent of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue or White’s “Here is New York.” They take the essence of the city and focus it, brushing over the crowds and the hard edges. The sidewalks in Hopper’s paintings are empty, but the steelwork on the bridges and the bedroom radiators is just right. His subjects are usually alone or with just a couple of other people, sitting in an office, an Automat, or a bedroom. To call them lonely, though, feels cheap. They invite imagination. The built city has an omnipresence in Hopper’s work, but it is very often just what it always is: a marvelous backdrop.
“If I Emailed My Parents Like Democrats Email Me” in McSweeney’s.
“I’ve just learned that someone has CHANGED the Netflix password in hopes of DESTROYING my Thursday night. This is absolutely unbelievable.
We’ve tried typing our birthdays all in a row. We’ve tried typing our birthdays all in a row, but with an exclamation point at the end. But now, we need you.
Please, this is a make-or-break moment. Will you rush the password before this week’s star baker is spoiled on Twitter?”