Walk

No. 5, originally uploaded by niznoz.

The Great Figure
by William Carlos Williams

Among the rain
and lights
I saw a figure 5
in gold
on a red
fireturck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

As an illustration of William Carlos William's poem, with the exception of the figure 5 in gold, the above picture is pretty lousy. Even more so on the scene: the firemen seemed relaxed and deliberate. They had travelled, at a modest pace, only about 300 yards from the firehouse on 7th Avenue along Houston to Sullivan Street. None the less, I was slightly star-struck by the number 5 on the fire engine: "I saw you in a poem, just the other day."

# posted by nick @ 4:02 pm

Peter Stuyvesant, originally uploaded by niznoz.

[Peter] Stuyvesant [1602-1672] had other ideas. He was family man now, and he wanted to put down his roots. Within the year [1650] he would arrange to buy the farm, called Bouwereie Number One, outright from the company, and then purchase acreage on both sides of it, giving him a plantation stretching from the East River west to the center of the island and covering approximately three hundred acres. Here he built a manor and chapel. Here he would live out his life and be buried, and here, over the parade of centuries, flappers, shtetl refugees, hippies, and punks--an aggregate of local residents running from Trotsky to Auden to Charlie Parker to Joey Ramone--would shuffle past his tomb*

*As a nice metaphor for the way history has muddled Manhattan's Dutch period, Stuyvesant's tombstone, embedded in the foundation of the Church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, manages to get both his age and title wrong.

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto, Vintage Books, 2005

# posted by nick @ 9:25 pm