Setting out around midday, I headed down to the Flushing Main Street station, a walk I have taken thousands of times (when working in Manhattan, I preferred to walk to the subway, rather than wait for a crowded bus, in both directions, unless it was raining or freezing cold). Riding an escalator deep underground, I swiped my Metrocard and got on a local (at that time of day, only locals run; express trains run during morning and evening rush hours).
In a few minutes the train doors closed, announcements were made, and the train moved out of the station. Just outside the tunnel, it stopped. I thought nothing much of it; trains do that all the time. Soon it moved, reached Willets Point-Mets, then lurched toward 111th Street, then 103rd, and then Junction Boulevard. I know those names by heart. I concentrated on reading my book, A time of gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (914.0455 F), a wonderful travelogue.
Crawling out of Junction, the train stopped. The stop became a delay. That made me look up and around, just as the conductor announced we were being delayed because of construction ahead. After a couple of minutes I began to wonder. Then the train moved, and reached the next station. That sequence was repeated, and as the train crawled out of 82nd Street station I considered the possibility of getting off at the next station, 74th Street, walking down to catch the E train, and taking that line to the G train.
It was then I realized I was annoyed with the delay. I'm not supposed to get annoyed about such trivialities any longer, now that I'm retired. But I'm a New Yorker, I rode the subway for decades, and grumbling is ingrained in my system.
Bah, I wouldn't switch; the time it took me to walk down to the E might be equal to the extra time it would take the 7 train to reach Court Square station, and I might have to stand on the E; I was already comfortably ensconced in a seat on the 7. The train left 74th Street in good order, and resumed its normal speed. My calculation had worked in my favor. Score one for the intrepid traveler.
The connection between the 7 and the G is one I had never taken before. One, I got off at that station (which used to be called Courthouse Square; its diminutive is perhaps meant to connote modernity) not more than a handful of times in my life. Two, I have ridden on the G train as few times. It was fun to take it, and pleasing: the New York City subway system is largely in bad shape, dirty, inconvenient and a pain in the ass. To see progress is heartwarming.
I got on a G train which might have been waiting for me; it wasn't, but it was crowded and left soon thereafter. I was about to sit down and heard a woman chattering on her cellphone; I found another seat several yards away (and when I sat down there I still could hear her voice). One other stop in Queens, and then it ducked under Newtown Creek and hurtled toward Greenpoint Avenue. Nassau, Lorimer, Metropolitan (the same avenue as in Queens); eventually it reached my destination, the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station (ceremonially opened by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia on April 9, 1936; it doesn't look that good any more).
With the aid of the maps app on my iPhone, I found my way to Livingston Street, and knew to turn left; without such an aid and my sense of direction surely I would've turned right. (Starting at Schermerhorn, I had turned right on Bond Street, where I should've turned left.) Going along Livingston, I saw a combination of old and new buildings. Sidewalks were crowded, traffic steady. Not quite cacophonous, the afternoon was noisy. I might say urban buzz, but it was louder.
The address of this building is 422 Fulton; I was seeing its back. It is a 12 story masonry special condominium constructed in 1920. It houses Macy's, among other tenants (it's the old A&S, a department store I remember, which is long gone, swallowed up by, as I recall, the parent company of Macy's. A&S stood for Abraham and Straus; Isidor Straus and his wife Ida went down with the Titanic, and a mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery memorializes them).
Other old buildings abound; interspersed among them, new ones are sprouting. Construction seems to be everywhere; it is difficult to believe the industry isn't booming. In contrast, I remember seeing a small handful of cranes when we were in Cuba in April of 2017. I daresay there were more cranes working in a half-dozen block area in Brooklyn this day (same can be said for Flushing, Queens) than I saw in Havana.
Reaching 110 Livingston, after crossing Boerum Place, I saw it was a condominium building, and not my destination. Checking my paperwork, I realized I wanted 130, not 110, so I went back outside, crossed Boerum again, and went inside 130 Livingston.
Turns out that is not where I was supposed to go for the Metrocard. 130 Livingston is the mailing address for such transactions. The working office is at 3 Stone Street in Manhattan.
Say again?
Yes, Manhattan. The security guard at 130 Livingston was very nice and very helpful. Just one stop on the 4 or 5 train, he said. And he gave me a map.
Stone Street is one block long, running between Broadway and Broad Street (can a street one block long run?).
Question is, of course, why does 130 Livingston have maps of where one should go for the Metrocard? Because, the obvious answer is, many people go to 130 Livingston instead of 3 Stone.
Another question: why aren't people directed to 3 Stone in the first place? Ah, the secrets of life can not be simply revealed to everyone.
It was fairly easy to get my business completed, and didn't take very long. I was given a number, waited for some few minutes, was called up to a counter (the NYCT workers sat behind very thick glass, perhaps bulletproof, a symptom of our society's vagaries), managed to hear the woman behind the glass talk to me over the loud conversation the customer next to me was having with someone over the phone (not a cellphone, but a landline a woman behind the thick glass had given her), had my picture taken, sat again and was called up to a different window to be given my temporary reduced-fare card by a very nice gentleman who waited for a loud conversation next to us to quiet down so he could speak in a civilized tone (I did like him). I thanked him, thanked the woman who had first helped me, went outside, back to Broadway, couldn't get into the bathroom in the nearby Starbucks, went into the Bowling Green station, loaded twenty bucks into my new Metrocard and used it to get back into the IRT station, catching a number 5 train back to Brooklyn's Borough Hall station.
Again using my maps app, I found the nearest Brooklyn Public Library, which happens to be the Brooklyn Heights branch. As I walked along Remsen Street (a street but five blocks long) I noticed a sudden change in the noise level and character of the neighborhood; I had clearly entered a completely different place: no clamoring traffic, no loud pedestrians, parents walking with young children, brownstones and not tall buildings. Brooklyn Heights announced itself.
From across the street I could not make out the legend on those plaques on either side of the front door so I walked over, and read Brooklyn Ear Association. Nice — wait a minute; ear? No, not ear, but bar, Bar Association.
Why would there be an ear association? What do I know? I was in Brooklyn, and I'm a Queens boy. Even in my home borough there are some unusual places and institutions. New York City is huge and never ceases to amaze me. So, sure an ear association could exist. It did seem weird, though.
On I went, to the library. I found it in a brownstone the next block over. I walked in — and it was tiny. Ain't Brooklyn Heights supposed to be posh? For a long moment I felt nonplussed (love that word). Then I realized the library was crowded, and loud.
Over the last several years that I worked as a public librarian, my library became increasingly loud. Back in 2005, when I went to library school, to get my Master's degree in Library Science (oh, indeed, librarians have an advanced degree, a fact which surprises more people than it should), one of the bywords was there is no shushing in libraries. We were adapting to a changing society, a good thing. Yet the change in acceptable behavior has been significant: cellphones and coffee cups became de rigueur, loud conversation an assumed right, eating equally so. What I saw, increasingly as time passed, was that people at the library defined their own standards; if they considered it appropriate, it became acceptable, even in the eyes of those whom, given external evidence, one might assume adhered to stringent standards.
I didn't always like the new normal, but I adapted. I never wanted the library to be a monastery, yet matters seemed to be swinging to the opposite extreme. I remember once, when I was in Library School at Queens College (an excellent example of public education), I went to study in its library. Out of the several floors of the building, two were designated quiet floors; the others weren't so designated but they were noisy floors. I went to a quiet floor. It wasn't. All around me students were having conversations, some in exuberant tones: read loud. I put up with it for a bit, then got fed up and asked a young man to lower his volume. He didn't appreciate the suggestion. But another youngster took great exception to my request, challenged me, inched to closer to me, and dropped his backpack in a challenging manner. I could not believe it: I was being challenged to a duel for asking someone to be quiet in a quiet floor, and the challenger wasn't even the one I asked. Go figure.
Yes, Brooklyn Heights. Turns out, I learned from doing a bit of research, the building I visited isn't the real home of this BPL branch, but temporary quarters. A complex set of factors enter into that equation, including politics and finances: mix people and money, toss in a dollop of status and drop in a helping of ambition, and it gets to be rather a mess. Anyway, I'm a visitor from Queens.
I headed on. By now it was four in the afternoon. A light rain had begun to fall. Traffic had thickened in the streets and on the sidewalks. Rush hour had begun. Getting a seat on the train home was now questionable. Yet I was in Brooklyn, surrounded by grand buildings. And what was the hurry? If I had to stand on the train, so what? Well, I wasn't happy about the prospect, but, hey, I had to make time for a couple of pictures.Brooklyn Borough Hall was completed in 1848, and was city hall when Brooklyn was a city. The land on which it sits was donated by the Remsen and Pierrepont families. Remsen I had just been on; Pierrepont is also nearby. It is on Joralemon Street.
I caught the G train, sat all the way to Court Square in Queens, walked upstairs, and took a 7 express; that second train was jam-packed, and I stood all the way to Junction Boulevard, where I sat the last few minutes of the ride.
When I got home I was exhausted.