Thursday, July 19, 2007
Summer in the city – parks, heat, storms, terrorist threats
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
If you are not visiting our local East Midtown parks, you are missing a good chunk of the charm of New York City. Take the two Stuyvesant Square parks, for example. Entering the West park on 17th Street, side, walking into the shade of great green trees in the coolth of the morning, you will pass a huge pink rose bush, balancing what seems to be a summer-blooming magnolia tree across the street from it. Raise your eyes and you will see a catalpa tree, with great heart shaped leaves and hanging fruit pods, an import from the American West, of which there are several in both parks. There are a few locals relaxing on the benches, mostly bag people waking after a night spent outdoors. We exchange hellos and a few learned words about the relative humidity today and yesterday – this is the second week of July 2007, and the heat has been immense, over 90 degrees. Approaching the fountain in the center of the West park, one notes that the greenery around it looks a bit parched by the hot sun – the blooming cleomes and the brown bayberry bushes could use some rain. This is in sharp contrast with the fountain’s twin in the East park, much more closely surrounded by the trees. There the cleomes show their full colors. We note this to Christie Dailey, our Parks and Recreation Department gardener, who happens to be working nearby, clearing out the dry brushes, with a few blue –shirted helpers assisting. This will free up the view of the blue hydrangeas and the white loosestrife stalks, their graceful gooseneck spikes gleaming. It is an invasive plant, distantly related to the taller pink loosestrife that aggressively attacks the wetlands upstate and everywhere else, overwhelming the native vegetation,
Our parks get good care, the meager city funds subsidized by the monies that Carol Schachter and the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association raise in an early Spring Street Fair, a worthy cause (if you think otherwise, dear friends, write me another letter).
New Yorkers have been dealing with this week’s heat wave well, men coming to work in short-sleeve shirts and putting on their office neckties and jackets, if and as required .I wear a necktie year round, as an item of clothing serving as protection from sore throats while moving in and out, between the warm outdoors and air-conditioned indoors. Most people keep sweaters in their desk drawers year-round. With the heat continuing and last year’s brownout well remembered, some cautious office people have brought in their battery-driven radios – even a five-inch screen TV has been noted. There is also an L. L. Bean crank-driven radio and its flashlight companion on someone’s desk - the flashlight holds the single or triple light quite well. I was lax, and only replaced the weakened emergency batteries in our home portable radio – they should be checked ever so often.. As luck and, for once, the foresight of Con Edison would have it, we escaped the brownout. Not only that, we were treated to a day of intermittent thunder, lightning and severe rain, much needed, about two inches in some locations. Once more, my Wall Street office dweller home going crowd handled the weather with aplomb and panache. The expensively dressed businesspeople left behind them their jackets and $70 neckties (some even more costly, there is a new Hermes shop across from the New York Stock Exchange, in the Downtown By Phillippe Starck condo highriser), rolled up their shirt sleeves and braved the Lexington Ave train with the rest of us. The women folk were the pluckiest, leaving the spiky heels behind and wearing light sandals, not much worried about their summer frocks getting wet under the flimsy $3 street- peddler-supplied umbrellas. Luckily, the air conditioning was tuned down on the Lex, and by the time my train reached 14th Street the storm was mostly over.
The spikes in the weather also coincided with spikes in terrorist attacks, in London and Glasgow. The police have gone to an extra effort. The morning arrivals at the Wall Street subway station were greeted by two patrol cars, with New York’s Finest at each exit, watching for suspects and presumably randomly searching backpacks . NYPD states that these observation posts are set up at least 35 times a year at each of the city’s 468 subway stations, more than 300 a week, each for several hours a at a time, 24 hours a day, with 20,000 observations since the beginning of the program two years ago. Two black-clad Emergency Service men, watchful and carrying submachine guns on the ready, have recently been seen in the Wall Street area with some frequency. All this should give us some comfort, in the mind-boggling days when MDs who have taken the Hippocratic oath engage in attempts to blow up innocent civilians, in the name of religion. When will the one billion plus peace-loving Muslims outlaw the few thosand terrorists?
If you are not visiting our local East Midtown parks, you are missing a good chunk of the charm of New York City. Take the two Stuyvesant Square parks, for example. Entering the West park on 17th Street, side, walking into the shade of great green trees in the coolth of the morning, you will pass a huge pink rose bush, balancing what seems to be a summer-blooming magnolia tree across the street from it. Raise your eyes and you will see a catalpa tree, with great heart shaped leaves and hanging fruit pods, an import from the American West, of which there are several in both parks. There are a few locals relaxing on the benches, mostly bag people waking after a night spent outdoors. We exchange hellos and a few learned words about the relative humidity today and yesterday – this is the second week of July 2007, and the heat has been immense, over 90 degrees. Approaching the fountain in the center of the West park, one notes that the greenery around it looks a bit parched by the hot sun – the blooming cleomes and the brown bayberry bushes could use some rain. This is in sharp contrast with the fountain’s twin in the East park, much more closely surrounded by the trees. There the cleomes show their full colors. We note this to Christie Dailey, our Parks and Recreation Department gardener, who happens to be working nearby, clearing out the dry brushes, with a few blue –shirted helpers assisting. This will free up the view of the blue hydrangeas and the white loosestrife stalks, their graceful gooseneck spikes gleaming. It is an invasive plant, distantly related to the taller pink loosestrife that aggressively attacks the wetlands upstate and everywhere else, overwhelming the native vegetation,
Our parks get good care, the meager city funds subsidized by the monies that Carol Schachter and the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association raise in an early Spring Street Fair, a worthy cause (if you think otherwise, dear friends, write me another letter).
New Yorkers have been dealing with this week’s heat wave well, men coming to work in short-sleeve shirts and putting on their office neckties and jackets, if and as required .I wear a necktie year round, as an item of clothing serving as protection from sore throats while moving in and out, between the warm outdoors and air-conditioned indoors. Most people keep sweaters in their desk drawers year-round. With the heat continuing and last year’s brownout well remembered, some cautious office people have brought in their battery-driven radios – even a five-inch screen TV has been noted. There is also an L. L. Bean crank-driven radio and its flashlight companion on someone’s desk - the flashlight holds the single or triple light quite well. I was lax, and only replaced the weakened emergency batteries in our home portable radio – they should be checked ever so often.. As luck and, for once, the foresight of Con Edison would have it, we escaped the brownout. Not only that, we were treated to a day of intermittent thunder, lightning and severe rain, much needed, about two inches in some locations. Once more, my Wall Street office dweller home going crowd handled the weather with aplomb and panache. The expensively dressed businesspeople left behind them their jackets and $70 neckties (some even more costly, there is a new Hermes shop across from the New York Stock Exchange, in the Downtown By Phillippe Starck condo highriser), rolled up their shirt sleeves and braved the Lexington Ave train with the rest of us. The women folk were the pluckiest, leaving the spiky heels behind and wearing light sandals, not much worried about their summer frocks getting wet under the flimsy $3 street- peddler-supplied umbrellas. Luckily, the air conditioning was tuned down on the Lex, and by the time my train reached 14th Street the storm was mostly over.
The spikes in the weather also coincided with spikes in terrorist attacks, in London and Glasgow. The police have gone to an extra effort. The morning arrivals at the Wall Street subway station were greeted by two patrol cars, with New York’s Finest at each exit, watching for suspects and presumably randomly searching backpacks . NYPD states that these observation posts are set up at least 35 times a year at each of the city’s 468 subway stations, more than 300 a week, each for several hours a at a time, 24 hours a day, with 20,000 observations since the beginning of the program two years ago. Two black-clad Emergency Service men, watchful and carrying submachine guns on the ready, have recently been seen in the Wall Street area with some frequency. All this should give us some comfort, in the mind-boggling days when MDs who have taken the Hippocratic oath engage in attempts to blow up innocent civilians, in the name of religion. When will the one billion plus peace-loving Muslims outlaw the few thosand terrorists?
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 5:38 AM 
