Escape From New York

Notes from Lynn: Towering Anthills

When Tara Levy and Dan North decided to buy a home in 1992, they found a condo ground-floor flat in one of the hundreds of Italianate rowhouses that line the streets of Jersey City. Built in 1870 in the Paulus Hook neighborhood, the four-story brick building had been falling apart through landlord neglect and the poverty of tenants in a shrinking blue-collar city with a reputation for crime and corruption.

“Gentrification” and “developer” share equal space in the vocabulary of urban distaste, but “renaissance” might be more apt for the scene on Sussex Street. One by one, dilapidated tenements are renovated into townhouse condos and apartments for refugees from Manhattan’s towering anthills. As Dan (at right) pointed out not many years ago, he could gaze at the spectacular skyline of New York from the rail of the Liberty Harbor Ferry ($5), while the investment bankers in their costly Manhattan offices could look across the Hudson and see the Colgate sign. It's still there, although the Colgate-Palmolive plants are long gone. Instead, the old industrial waterfront is the new home for Jersey City ’s mini version of Wall Street – the 42-story Goldman-Sachs Building and a growing crop of high-rise offices and apartment towers. It came as something of a surprise to Dan, who assumed he was settling down in a funky old neighborhood. It was a reminder of his old haunts in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where everybody considered New Jersey in general and Jersey City in particular to be a foreign country inhabited by demented people who spoke a different language. (Nobody says "Joisey," we are told by an internet expert. To be helpful, he offers authentic gibberish: Joey: Hey Vinny, yew dewsh-bag. What-sup-witch-yew? Where-yew-go last night? Yew hang in Jerzee? Vinny: Nah, I hung out in duh-siddy wid-dat chick Merry wit da Brooklyn ax-cent.)

The new Jerzeeites also hang out in duh-siddy. Dan, a deft rewriteman when I met him in the early 1960s at the old San Francisco Examiner, is retired from his longtime post as news editor for Local 1199 of the Hospital and Health Employees Union. But he still boards the PATH subway under the river to teach journalism and media studies at City College of New York. Tara (at left), an attorney with the National Labor Relations Board, works in an office in Newark but commutes regularly to concerts, plays, meetings and the other attractions of Manhattan.

When they return, it’s to a comfortable home with foot-thick walls that rise 11 feet from polished wooden floors. They have a big backyard garden, a fireplace, thousands of books and two bathrooms. One bedroom is an office/den; the other is upstairs, accessible by a wrought-iron spiral staircase. These comforts and amenities are worth mentioning whenever I hear the sneers of New Yorkers.

Notable: Roadside attractions on the Victory Lap included tours of the newsrooms at the New York Daily News and the New York Times. Both have been transplanted into new and expensive quarters that test one of the pet theories of the late C. Northcote Parkinson, to wit: Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions at the point of collapse.

Desks and cubicles at the upmarket Times are generally pretty tidy, as you might expect in offices evidently designed to look like display windows. However, desks and cubicles at the proudly plebian News are piled with old newspapers, discarded notebooks, forgotten handouts and misplaced printouts -- evidence that this valuable old-time newspaper tradition hasn’t been suppressed by fancy offices.

In any event, we noted that rewriteman and reporter Bill Hutchinson, an SF State journalism alumnus, is called “Hutch” by his colleagues at the News. We dined on giant heart-attack pastrami sandwiches at the 2nd Avenue Deli (which isn't on 2nd Avenue) with Hutch/Bill and his wife, our treasured friend, Lisa Amand (above). She is recovering in their Brooklyn home from hip surgery and awaits with trepidation another operation on her other hip. In the newsroom, we met a legend: Bill Gallo (at right with Bill), the sports cartoonist, whose career began in 1941.

At the Times, we were shown around by Mia Navarro, the super-talented ex-Examiner writer. She covers environmental issues. We were reunited with friendly Marlene Bagley, another Examiner alumna. She is a copy editor at the Times. Like Dan North, she now lives in Jersey City. Mia then took us to dinner at a ribs palace, Virgil's, with her husband, Jim Sterngold, who has moved to New York with a job at Bloomberg News as an investigative reporter. And they, too, are moving to New Jersey.

Add Margo's sister, lulu, to the list of those who have abandoned the cramped quarters and intense noise of Manhattan for the relative calm and spaciousness of Jersey City. Lulu and her partner Joseph Illidge (at right) met us for a Thai dinner at one of their favorite Jersey City haunts. Their new apartment is at least five times the size of the Hell's Kitchen apartment that lulu lived in for about 10 years. The old place was so small that when the dog, Nana, paced the apartment, she went forward into the bedroom, and then backed out -- because she couldn't turn around in there -- and then walked into the kitchen and backed out. Nana, who doesn't have to throw it into reverse anymore, is clearly in heaven. Just like lulu and Joseph.

Notes from Margo: The Allure of the Bird

Hundreds of brants gathered, chattering, on the grass, pecking for food. The collective term for geese, according to my iPhone’s bird-book, is "blizzard," "chevron," "knot" or "string." Through my binoculars, I could see blizzards, chevrons, knots and strings of the small black-headed geese. We had driven to Liberty Park with Dan North, Lynn’s dear friend from the old Examiner days who now lives in Jersey City, for a little urban bird-watching. In the background, instead of quiet marshes or towering hills, were the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. We got nothing particularly exotic – a great blue heron, a few American coots, some widgeons, mallards, mute swans, and a gazillion brants – but the really remarkable thing, as Lynn noted, is that we were within 10 miles of 10 million people (wild guess). And we are soaking up this abundance of nature anyway.

One of the reasons that bird-watching is so alluring, I think, is that no matter where you are, birds can give you a little feeling of being in nature. The starlings and Brewer’s blackbirds in every parking lot in every strip mall in the country are singing and whistling every time you finish your grocery shopping and head for the car with the plastic bags hanging from your hands. You just have to listen and you’re in nature. Just a little, of course. The asphalt is still there. But maybe it’s enough.

I don’t usually think of the urban centers of the East Coast as nature preserves. But that’s been a big part of our experience here on the outskirts of New York. In three days with Kathy Podmaniczky in the Hudson Valley north of New York, we went hiking one day, bird-watching one day and biking one day. All three days brought the kind of immersion in nature that I think of as less urban and Eastern and more rural and Western than the “current location” on my navigator would have caused me to expect.

We decided not to push our luck, and left the car with Kathy in Pleasant Valley, and rode the train down the Hudson River into Manhattan, and landed with Dan in Jersey City. Lynn had taken the 90-minute scenic train ride a few days before me, allowing me a few more days with Kathy. (Kathy and I went bird-watching with a friend of hers, and started the day thrilling to a bald eagle circling overhead. The rest of the walk was lovely, with titmice, bitterns, northern flickers, and many other fine birds, but sheesh!! being welcomed to the riverside by a bald eagle! No way to beat that.) I followed Lynn a few days later on the train, made my way through a relatively bird-free Midtown Manhattan, and found Dan and Tara's place in Jersey City. Being the perfect host, Dan offered a spot of bird-watching first thing, hence the Statue of Liberty and the blizzard of brants.

In other news: The laptop's hard drive died, and needed to be replaced. We found a spot in New York for the work. Most of our stuff was backed up on our little flashdrives, so very little harm was done, and we're back in business now.

Mileage from Pleasant Valley to Manhattan (on the train) 91 miles

From Manhattan to Jersey City (by subway, approximately): 5 miles

Total mileage so far (on The Guppy): still 7,207