A Monk's Life in Medieval New York
Last Thursday I was in New York for depositions and surprisingly finished my examination by about 12:30. I took the subway uptown from the creepy AIG building on Wall Street and by 1 p.m., I was in a baseball cap, jeans and walking shoes with a wide open afternoon in front of me. It was only about 60 degrees and rainy and very very windy. All the time the day before that I had spent looking at the Cafe Bustelo trucks from our stuck train inspired me to go up to Columbia and eat a late afternoon lunch at my favorite Cuban diner, La Rosita's (108th and B'way).
I decided to walk through campus before eating. As I've written before, I love the Columbia/Barnard campus, particularly the huge numbers of book stores and libraries. I always sneer at people who go back to their undergraduate homecoming football games but I suppose I do the same thing when I go back to my undergraduate campus to look for books. When I was a student, I would spend hours in the libraries and bookstores. People would meet each other in them, "I'll meet you at the architecture library at 3 -- I'll be in the armchair chair near the pen and ink drawing of the Chrysler Building." Or, "Barnard Bookforum, 4 p.m., Women's Studies section." Or, "Butler stacks, floor 8, the row with the Matisse books." It was not unheard of for people to spend an empty afternoon in the stacks poking around the books. There are more bookstores and libraries than places to eat at the Columbia campus. There is a library in each department, which means that roughly speaking, there is a library in each academic building on the campus. Plus the main University library (Butler) which has about four individual libraries inside it, not counting the 20 floors of stacks complete with timed lighting and compressible aisles (the opening scene in GhostBusters was shot in the Butler stacks), and the Barnard College main library (Barnard Library) and the school of engineering's main library (Mudd). There is even a branch of the New York Public Library inside the Butler library building. The best libraries for reading and contemplating life are the architecture library in Avery -- which is underground with skylights and ferns and wonderful contemporary drawings and blueprints of famous building -- and the East Asian library in Kent, which cannot possibly distract you from your real work because none of the books are in English. The East Asian library is built out of what seems like one solid piece of mahogany, with brass lamps and brass mesh gates on the bookshelves with brass knobs and brass keys to open them with. The books themselves all seem to have gold leaf edging on each sheet of paper. On the walls were very valuable paper cuttings and Chinese calligraphy. I was sometimes afraid to go there because it was never a sure thing that the desk attendants spoke English. I didn't fully realize how great the libraries at Columbia are until I went to Duke. The undergraduate libraries there are few in number minuscule compared to our libraries, and they don't really have anything that could properly be called stacks -- they just have about 8 floors of bookshelves. Whatever.
Anyway, the reason I say all this is that I decided on the subway that before I went to La Rosita's, I would stop in either a bookstore or a library to find something to read. I was tired of reading about insurance. I got off at the 110th Street stop and as I was crossing 112th Street, I looked East and caught sight of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. For those of you who have never heard of this place, St. John the Divine is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world already and they haven't even finished building it yet. It was begun in the late 1880s and funded partially with robber baron money (J.P. Morgan, etc.), but all that's done is the nave and the crossing. The arms of the crossing are little stub ends, there is no bell tower over the dome, and the tower over the entrance is still draped in scaffolding. It was the very first place I ever went in my whole life in New York -- in 10th grade I sang in a rather competitive choir and we came to New York to sing at St. John the Divine (we also sang at the church in the bottom of the Citicorp building in mid-town, but that's a story for another day). I love St. John the Divine. So, as you can imagine, I was sucked off Broadway and onto 112th Street in the direction of the cathedral before I knew what was happening. But half way down the street and I passed a NEW bookstore! I had never seen it before, I'm sure it didn't exist when I went to school there. It is called Zephyr and from the street it looks like just a very small independent bookstore. Even thought I had just been sucked off 112th street towards the Cathedral, here I was sucked off 112th street into the open door of the store. The Cathedral could wait.
From the ground floor this new bookstore is a totally typical New York bookstore. The titles of the books were things you find a lot of in New York and not very much of elsewhere. Titles like "Urban Palimpsests," "Bisexuality in Middle-to-Late Antiquity," "China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature," "Culture in the Public Sphere," "The English Literature of America," etc. This store carried everything ever written by Noam Chomsky and Heidegger. It had all of Freud's writing and all of Freud's students' writing and all of the post-modern, deconstructionist Freudian literature and all of everyone who was anti-Freud or post-Freud and books like "Writing and Madness" and "Overcome by Modernity." All of these books were on the first floor -- and at the back there is a very discrete staircase that goes up to a gigantic upstairs. I realized that this store replaces the old Barnard Bookforum and carries course books for virtually the entire humanities and social science curriculum at the University. I was in heaven. Every book I had ever read in college was there, plus all the books I had been assigned but had not read, plus all the books assigned to my friends in classes I was not taking, plus all the books published in the intervening 11 years since I had graduated. The school year had just ended so most of the books were on sale. A few graduate students were lying around wanly drinking coffee in a very earnest way. A salesperson was taking inventory. It was pouring rain outside. I sat on a stool in an aisle and opened all the books I remembered fondly but no longer own. Books like Sources in Japanese Tradition, part of the series of "Sources of ... " books about East Asian philosophy (there are companion books for Indian, Korean and Chinese Thought as well). All the books written by my former professors. All the books by and about Kant and Nietzsche that everyone argued so much about....etc. I probably spent 2 hours in there. I bought a book about writing written by a former writing professor of mine, I bought a book about how all the streets in New York got their names, and I bought a book about the Slow Food Movement (as oppose to the Fast Food movement). These were pretty lightweight books in the world of Columbia scholarship but they would do for eating rice and beans at La Rosita's.
i
Then I charged out of the store and ran down the street to the Cathedral. Anyone who has never been here really doesn't know what he or she is missing. It started out life as Byzantine Cathedral and then the original architect either died or was sacked or something and the new guy decided the Byzantine style was old as mold and started building a romanesque-style building instead. The result is called Gothic, not Byzantine, even thought it is not authentically either one. The place is huge. The whole of the Statue of Liberty can fit inside the crossing and it has the longest nave of any church in the world. Also, the place, even though it is not finished yet, has the feel of incredible age. It seems ancient. It is made of massive dark stones on the outside and on the inside it is almost pitch dark. You get into it by growing through massive bronze doors that might as well be the Gates of Jericho. The only light comes from the dark blue stained glass windows, which are miles above the floor, and a few feeble candelabras right at the door and 601 feet away at the crossing. It is almost impossible to see the pews. Forget about trying to find your way around the apse, you almost need a flashlight. Several hundred people could sit inside St. John the Divine without being able to see each other at all. The cathedral is Episcopalian and is the seat of the New York diocese. Every year it has an annual Blessing of the Bicycles (it is very environmentally conscious) as well as, on St. Francis Day, a Blessing of the Animals to which you can bring your pet and during which goats and llamas and sheeps process down the 601 foot long aisle. It is a very happy place. Another regular event is the Gyuto Monks who come from Tibet and sing multiphonic songs, i.e., each monk has learned how to sing three notes at the same time, like a chord. It sounds bizarre. Once when I was a student several of my friends and I were taking a Buddhism class and we went to see the monks sing to further our education. We were shocked when our Buddhism professor (Robert Thurman, also famous for being Uma Thurman's father), got up in a saffron robe and started seeing his three-notes-at-once along with the rest of the monks. Outside the cathedral is a garden planted with plants that lived during the time of Christ. It is called the Bible Garden and it has a maze in it and lovely blue tiled mosaics. There are little signs identifying the plants -- none of which are easily recognizable because, after all, they lived during the time of Christ and are therefore rather obscure. Also outside is a giant sculpture called the Peace Fountain. The Peace Fountain is a very weird sculpture, so weird that I'm not sure I can describe it. It is supposed to represent All God's Creatures but it ends up looking like a Hieronymous Bosch painting with animals with legs that turn into arms and heads that belong to a different species and bits and pieces of creatures hanging in strange places and a lobster claw and a Sun with a big smiley face and about half dozen sets of hands that are praying and some antelopes and a boat, etc. All around the outside are sculptures of animals done by kindergarten children, an age group not usually known for its eye-hand coordination. I have attached a jpeg of it hereto to give you a sense of the wackiness.
I was once scared half-witless by this sculpture because a few friends of mine and I decided one night to climb the outside of St. John the Divine (for fellow alums reading this, it was Rens Troost, Ethan Rafferty, Will Pickering and me). It had scaffolding up the side of it then -- in fact it still does. This was illegal and dangerous so we did it in the middle of the night, naturally. We had to avoid the nightwatchman which meant we had to creep around the Peace Fountain until he went on his appointed rounds and then we ran for the scaffolding. This was when I first noticed the lobster claw hanging off the rim of the fountain and it took me a while to figure out what it was. Meanwhile, I stood paralyzed, sure I was about to be arrested. As it turned out, I was not arrested, and we made it to the scaffolding, and we climbed literally up the outside of the largest Gothic cathedral in the world and walked along the top of the flying buttresses to the crossing and sat on top of the dome. I can't imagine now how we got the courage to do this, especially because I am not very good with heights. From the top of the dome you can see all the way up to the Bronx and all the way down Central Park to midtown and the building down there that tells you what the weather is. The night we did this was warm and clear, and we lay on the dome looking up at the stars for a really long time. I remember the building on 59th Street telling us it was 74 degrees. It felt like flying. The Cathedral stands on the top of Morningside Heights and Morningside Park is right behind it. Morningside Park is little more than a wooded cliff, dropping down about 100 feet or so to Harlem. This made us feel that we were even higher up than we were. After an hour or two we headed back, but this time we got into the top of the cathedral somehow and walked along all the maintenance cat walks in the ceiling, looking down hundreds of feet to the floor of the cathedral and the one lone candelabra burning at the crossing. We found a way into the area over the altar that is between the ceiling and the roof -- the floor we were walking on was concave because of the arches under us that spanned the roof over the choir and the organ pipes. The roof above us was convex because it was the underside of the dome we had just been sitting on. We walked the length of the nave on the catwalks, looking down at the arches from above. The catwalks had low wattage lightbulbs every 100 feet or so, so we could see where were going. They made everything look gold, like an Indiana Jones movie. We got into the towers at the street side of the church -- and were surprised to find that they are just empty space inside from the top of the brass doors straight up to the top. They are packed with pigeons -- the pigeons went bananas went we got in there so we scrammed (the pigeons also stank). Then it was back down the scaffolding, around the nightwatchman's hut, and back to the dangling claw at the Peace Fountain. Something I will never forget and will never do again.
After all that I went straight to La Rosita's for my rice and beans. This place was a hangout for us in school, but it appears that with the gentrification that has gone on around campus, it is no longer as popular. It is a total dump -- ancient linoleum counters, fluorescent lights, a rotary dial telephone on the counter, very few English speaking employees. We always get the yellow rice and black beans with sunny side up eggs and Cuban coffee. But you can actually get anything there. The menu is written in felt tip pen on about seven white boards bearing beer advertisements -- each new white board just picks up where the old board left off. The white boards are not arranged next to each other, so you have to swivel around in your chair and look around the whole place to find them all. I'm still finding new menus boards at La Rosita's. You can get oxtail stew, filet mignon, Chinese noodles and pepper steak, red snapper, Cuban sandwiches, paella, whatever, you name it. But I've never seen anyone ever eat anything other than yellow rice and black beans with sunnyside up eggs.
I sat at the counter (it was still pouring rain out) in my stylish nylon black topcoat and read my new books and ate my rice and beans and drank three cups of Cuban coffee and thought what a long long way I had come since that morning when I had been down at the AIG building on Wall Street deposing an insurance executive.
I decided to walk through campus before eating. As I've written before, I love the Columbia/Barnard campus, particularly the huge numbers of book stores and libraries. I always sneer at people who go back to their undergraduate homecoming football games but I suppose I do the same thing when I go back to my undergraduate campus to look for books. When I was a student, I would spend hours in the libraries and bookstores. People would meet each other in them, "I'll meet you at the architecture library at 3 -- I'll be in the armchair chair near the pen and ink drawing of the Chrysler Building." Or, "Barnard Bookforum, 4 p.m., Women's Studies section." Or, "Butler stacks, floor 8, the row with the Matisse books." It was not unheard of for people to spend an empty afternoon in the stacks poking around the books. There are more bookstores and libraries than places to eat at the Columbia campus. There is a library in each department, which means that roughly speaking, there is a library in each academic building on the campus. Plus the main University library (Butler) which has about four individual libraries inside it, not counting the 20 floors of stacks complete with timed lighting and compressible aisles (the opening scene in GhostBusters was shot in the Butler stacks), and the Barnard College main library (Barnard Library) and the school of engineering's main library (Mudd). There is even a branch of the New York Public Library inside the Butler library building. The best libraries for reading and contemplating life are the architecture library in Avery -- which is underground with skylights and ferns and wonderful contemporary drawings and blueprints of famous building -- and the East Asian library in Kent, which cannot possibly distract you from your real work because none of the books are in English. The East Asian library is built out of what seems like one solid piece of mahogany, with brass lamps and brass mesh gates on the bookshelves with brass knobs and brass keys to open them with. The books themselves all seem to have gold leaf edging on each sheet of paper. On the walls were very valuable paper cuttings and Chinese calligraphy. I was sometimes afraid to go there because it was never a sure thing that the desk attendants spoke English. I didn't fully realize how great the libraries at Columbia are until I went to Duke. The undergraduate libraries there are few in number minuscule compared to our libraries, and they don't really have anything that could properly be called stacks -- they just have about 8 floors of bookshelves. Whatever.
Anyway, the reason I say all this is that I decided on the subway that before I went to La Rosita's, I would stop in either a bookstore or a library to find something to read. I was tired of reading about insurance. I got off at the 110th Street stop and as I was crossing 112th Street, I looked East and caught sight of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. For those of you who have never heard of this place, St. John the Divine is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world already and they haven't even finished building it yet. It was begun in the late 1880s and funded partially with robber baron money (J.P. Morgan, etc.), but all that's done is the nave and the crossing. The arms of the crossing are little stub ends, there is no bell tower over the dome, and the tower over the entrance is still draped in scaffolding. It was the very first place I ever went in my whole life in New York -- in 10th grade I sang in a rather competitive choir and we came to New York to sing at St. John the Divine (we also sang at the church in the bottom of the Citicorp building in mid-town, but that's a story for another day). I love St. John the Divine. So, as you can imagine, I was sucked off Broadway and onto 112th Street in the direction of the cathedral before I knew what was happening. But half way down the street and I passed a NEW bookstore! I had never seen it before, I'm sure it didn't exist when I went to school there. It is called Zephyr and from the street it looks like just a very small independent bookstore. Even thought I had just been sucked off 112th street towards the Cathedral, here I was sucked off 112th street into the open door of the store. The Cathedral could wait.
From the ground floor this new bookstore is a totally typical New York bookstore. The titles of the books were things you find a lot of in New York and not very much of elsewhere. Titles like "Urban Palimpsests," "Bisexuality in Middle-to-Late Antiquity," "China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature," "Culture in the Public Sphere," "The English Literature of America," etc. This store carried everything ever written by Noam Chomsky and Heidegger. It had all of Freud's writing and all of Freud's students' writing and all of the post-modern, deconstructionist Freudian literature and all of everyone who was anti-Freud or post-Freud and books like "Writing and Madness" and "Overcome by Modernity." All of these books were on the first floor -- and at the back there is a very discrete staircase that goes up to a gigantic upstairs. I realized that this store replaces the old Barnard Bookforum and carries course books for virtually the entire humanities and social science curriculum at the University. I was in heaven. Every book I had ever read in college was there, plus all the books I had been assigned but had not read, plus all the books assigned to my friends in classes I was not taking, plus all the books published in the intervening 11 years since I had graduated. The school year had just ended so most of the books were on sale. A few graduate students were lying around wanly drinking coffee in a very earnest way. A salesperson was taking inventory. It was pouring rain outside. I sat on a stool in an aisle and opened all the books I remembered fondly but no longer own. Books like Sources in Japanese Tradition, part of the series of "Sources of ... " books about East Asian philosophy (there are companion books for Indian, Korean and Chinese Thought as well). All the books written by my former professors. All the books by and about Kant and Nietzsche that everyone argued so much about....etc. I probably spent 2 hours in there. I bought a book about writing written by a former writing professor of mine, I bought a book about how all the streets in New York got their names, and I bought a book about the Slow Food Movement (as oppose to the Fast Food movement). These were pretty lightweight books in the world of Columbia scholarship but they would do for eating rice and beans at La Rosita's.
i
Then I charged out of the store and ran down the street to the Cathedral. Anyone who has never been here really doesn't know what he or she is missing. It started out life as Byzantine Cathedral and then the original architect either died or was sacked or something and the new guy decided the Byzantine style was old as mold and started building a romanesque-style building instead. The result is called Gothic, not Byzantine, even thought it is not authentically either one. The place is huge. The whole of the Statue of Liberty can fit inside the crossing and it has the longest nave of any church in the world. Also, the place, even though it is not finished yet, has the feel of incredible age. It seems ancient. It is made of massive dark stones on the outside and on the inside it is almost pitch dark. You get into it by growing through massive bronze doors that might as well be the Gates of Jericho. The only light comes from the dark blue stained glass windows, which are miles above the floor, and a few feeble candelabras right at the door and 601 feet away at the crossing. It is almost impossible to see the pews. Forget about trying to find your way around the apse, you almost need a flashlight. Several hundred people could sit inside St. John the Divine without being able to see each other at all. The cathedral is Episcopalian and is the seat of the New York diocese. Every year it has an annual Blessing of the Bicycles (it is very environmentally conscious) as well as, on St. Francis Day, a Blessing of the Animals to which you can bring your pet and during which goats and llamas and sheeps process down the 601 foot long aisle. It is a very happy place. Another regular event is the Gyuto Monks who come from Tibet and sing multiphonic songs, i.e., each monk has learned how to sing three notes at the same time, like a chord. It sounds bizarre. Once when I was a student several of my friends and I were taking a Buddhism class and we went to see the monks sing to further our education. We were shocked when our Buddhism professor (Robert Thurman, also famous for being Uma Thurman's father), got up in a saffron robe and started seeing his three-notes-at-once along with the rest of the monks. Outside the cathedral is a garden planted with plants that lived during the time of Christ. It is called the Bible Garden and it has a maze in it and lovely blue tiled mosaics. There are little signs identifying the plants -- none of which are easily recognizable because, after all, they lived during the time of Christ and are therefore rather obscure. Also outside is a giant sculpture called the Peace Fountain. The Peace Fountain is a very weird sculpture, so weird that I'm not sure I can describe it. It is supposed to represent All God's Creatures but it ends up looking like a Hieronymous Bosch painting with animals with legs that turn into arms and heads that belong to a different species and bits and pieces of creatures hanging in strange places and a lobster claw and a Sun with a big smiley face and about half dozen sets of hands that are praying and some antelopes and a boat, etc. All around the outside are sculptures of animals done by kindergarten children, an age group not usually known for its eye-hand coordination. I have attached a jpeg of it hereto to give you a sense of the wackiness.
I was once scared half-witless by this sculpture because a few friends of mine and I decided one night to climb the outside of St. John the Divine (for fellow alums reading this, it was Rens Troost, Ethan Rafferty, Will Pickering and me). It had scaffolding up the side of it then -- in fact it still does. This was illegal and dangerous so we did it in the middle of the night, naturally. We had to avoid the nightwatchman which meant we had to creep around the Peace Fountain until he went on his appointed rounds and then we ran for the scaffolding. This was when I first noticed the lobster claw hanging off the rim of the fountain and it took me a while to figure out what it was. Meanwhile, I stood paralyzed, sure I was about to be arrested. As it turned out, I was not arrested, and we made it to the scaffolding, and we climbed literally up the outside of the largest Gothic cathedral in the world and walked along the top of the flying buttresses to the crossing and sat on top of the dome. I can't imagine now how we got the courage to do this, especially because I am not very good with heights. From the top of the dome you can see all the way up to the Bronx and all the way down Central Park to midtown and the building down there that tells you what the weather is. The night we did this was warm and clear, and we lay on the dome looking up at the stars for a really long time. I remember the building on 59th Street telling us it was 74 degrees. It felt like flying. The Cathedral stands on the top of Morningside Heights and Morningside Park is right behind it. Morningside Park is little more than a wooded cliff, dropping down about 100 feet or so to Harlem. This made us feel that we were even higher up than we were. After an hour or two we headed back, but this time we got into the top of the cathedral somehow and walked along all the maintenance cat walks in the ceiling, looking down hundreds of feet to the floor of the cathedral and the one lone candelabra burning at the crossing. We found a way into the area over the altar that is between the ceiling and the roof -- the floor we were walking on was concave because of the arches under us that spanned the roof over the choir and the organ pipes. The roof above us was convex because it was the underside of the dome we had just been sitting on. We walked the length of the nave on the catwalks, looking down at the arches from above. The catwalks had low wattage lightbulbs every 100 feet or so, so we could see where were going. They made everything look gold, like an Indiana Jones movie. We got into the towers at the street side of the church -- and were surprised to find that they are just empty space inside from the top of the brass doors straight up to the top. They are packed with pigeons -- the pigeons went bananas went we got in there so we scrammed (the pigeons also stank). Then it was back down the scaffolding, around the nightwatchman's hut, and back to the dangling claw at the Peace Fountain. Something I will never forget and will never do again.
After all that I went straight to La Rosita's for my rice and beans. This place was a hangout for us in school, but it appears that with the gentrification that has gone on around campus, it is no longer as popular. It is a total dump -- ancient linoleum counters, fluorescent lights, a rotary dial telephone on the counter, very few English speaking employees. We always get the yellow rice and black beans with sunny side up eggs and Cuban coffee. But you can actually get anything there. The menu is written in felt tip pen on about seven white boards bearing beer advertisements -- each new white board just picks up where the old board left off. The white boards are not arranged next to each other, so you have to swivel around in your chair and look around the whole place to find them all. I'm still finding new menus boards at La Rosita's. You can get oxtail stew, filet mignon, Chinese noodles and pepper steak, red snapper, Cuban sandwiches, paella, whatever, you name it. But I've never seen anyone ever eat anything other than yellow rice and black beans with sunnyside up eggs.
I sat at the counter (it was still pouring rain out) in my stylish nylon black topcoat and read my new books and ate my rice and beans and drank three cups of Cuban coffee and thought what a long long way I had come since that morning when I had been down at the AIG building on Wall Street deposing an insurance executive.
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