I loved blogging from Beirut (http://walkinginbeirut.blogspot.com) and have missed writing an account of our adventures while living there. I took it back up briefly with a trip to Portugal last February but never finished the last entries I planned to write.
I dabbled briefly with writing about walking in Franklin during my year of living in a rural town in upstate New York. Somehow in Franklin there just wasn't enough to write about. I'm not a nature person who can wax elegantly about the creatures that I avoided seeing on my walks in the hills. I did observe a turtle cross four lanes of traffic at a most unlikely spot. As each car approached, it pulled back into its shell and then carried on when the coast was clear. True, I kicked myself later for not talking out my cell phone and videoing it. Never occurred to me to write about it.
Today I was listening to the novel Americanah about a blogger who did a blog entry on racism that I thought was brilliant. Listening to this book reminded me of the pleasure of writing about thoughts and experiences.
As I was describing my day to Andy, I realized that I had come up with a blog idea or better yet a blog idea had found me. It is actually an old story. If you want some background you can go to a blog my daughter and I started three years ago (http://dearmrrosenblatt.blogspot.com). It was interrupted when I moved to Beirut.
So it is now two and a half years later. During the time I was away from West 25th Street, the BRC shelter settled in and changed our neighborhood.
To be clear when we moved to West 25th Street twenty years ago, it was a challenging place to live. There were parking lots on every corner and our street was empty canyon. There were plenty of people on the street during the day because of all of office buildings and businesses but at night it was dark and scary. I remember walking down the middle of the street at night because the potential for danger was greater on the sidewalk and in the crevices that passed for doorways.
There were no supermarkets and few businesses that catered to residents. A deli was on one corner and an XXXrated video store across the street. The only thing this part of town had going for it was it is the most convenient location in all of Manhattan. I have walked to the Battery as well as to the George Washington Bridge. Midtown and the Village are just a saunter away.
Manhattan "developers" finally figured this out and there was a ten year building boom as 30 and 40 story buildings sprung up along Sixth and Seventh Avenues. With the buildings came amenities. If you love good food, as I do, there is no better place to live than on my block. Fairway is on one corner, Whole Foods on another corner, Trader Joe's down the avenue and the Union Square Farmer's Market just blocks away.
It is hard to understand how anyone could think that this would be a good location for a massive homeless shelter, but that was what the city came up with. BRC took over an office building and opened its doors to drug addicts, sex offenders, pedophiles, the mentally ill, and men who were facing real challenges.
Mr. Rosenblatt called me and my neighbors rotten, unfeeling people who didn't care about the homeless. He told us, with a straight face that this shelter was going to be a big improvement for our community and actually raise our property values and improve the quality of our lives.
Needless to say, that is not how it turned out. The quality of life on West 25th Street has become a challenge with men hanging out on the street, peeing and spitting in our doorways, lighting up joints as they exit the building where they are in drug treatment programs, and haranguing people passing by with, "can you spare a buck for coffee" or "loose joints." When was the last time you heard somebody offering loose joints?
I dabbled briefly with writing about walking in Franklin during my year of living in a rural town in upstate New York. Somehow in Franklin there just wasn't enough to write about. I'm not a nature person who can wax elegantly about the creatures that I avoided seeing on my walks in the hills. I did observe a turtle cross four lanes of traffic at a most unlikely spot. As each car approached, it pulled back into its shell and then carried on when the coast was clear. True, I kicked myself later for not talking out my cell phone and videoing it. Never occurred to me to write about it.
Today I was listening to the novel Americanah about a blogger who did a blog entry on racism that I thought was brilliant. Listening to this book reminded me of the pleasure of writing about thoughts and experiences.
As I was describing my day to Andy, I realized that I had come up with a blog idea or better yet a blog idea had found me. It is actually an old story. If you want some background you can go to a blog my daughter and I started three years ago (http://dearmrrosenblatt.blogspot.com). It was interrupted when I moved to Beirut.
So it is now two and a half years later. During the time I was away from West 25th Street, the BRC shelter settled in and changed our neighborhood.
To be clear when we moved to West 25th Street twenty years ago, it was a challenging place to live. There were parking lots on every corner and our street was empty canyon. There were plenty of people on the street during the day because of all of office buildings and businesses but at night it was dark and scary. I remember walking down the middle of the street at night because the potential for danger was greater on the sidewalk and in the crevices that passed for doorways.
There were no supermarkets and few businesses that catered to residents. A deli was on one corner and an XXXrated video store across the street. The only thing this part of town had going for it was it is the most convenient location in all of Manhattan. I have walked to the Battery as well as to the George Washington Bridge. Midtown and the Village are just a saunter away.
Manhattan "developers" finally figured this out and there was a ten year building boom as 30 and 40 story buildings sprung up along Sixth and Seventh Avenues. With the buildings came amenities. If you love good food, as I do, there is no better place to live than on my block. Fairway is on one corner, Whole Foods on another corner, Trader Joe's down the avenue and the Union Square Farmer's Market just blocks away.
It is hard to understand how anyone could think that this would be a good location for a massive homeless shelter, but that was what the city came up with. BRC took over an office building and opened its doors to drug addicts, sex offenders, pedophiles, the mentally ill, and men who were facing real challenges.
Mr. Rosenblatt called me and my neighbors rotten, unfeeling people who didn't care about the homeless. He told us, with a straight face that this shelter was going to be a big improvement for our community and actually raise our property values and improve the quality of our lives.
Needless to say, that is not how it turned out. The quality of life on West 25th Street has become a challenge with men hanging out on the street, peeing and spitting in our doorways, lighting up joints as they exit the building where they are in drug treatment programs, and haranguing people passing by with, "can you spare a buck for coffee" or "loose joints." When was the last time you heard somebody offering loose joints?
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