New York Stories

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm

After they've seen Paree'

How ya gonna keep 'em away from Broadway

Jazzin around and paintin' the town

-Joe Young and Sam F. Fields

Starting to feel a little melancholy after we wrapped up my last class in Tax Planning for Real Estate Transactions. A couple of us exchanged contact information. Thirty-four days and we'll be loading up the Caddy and driving through the Holland Tunnel.

Walking anywhere in Manhattan involves an elaborate game I play to try to minimize my time standing at crosswalks waiting for the light to change. Here's the Google Maps version of my walk from the apartment to Furman Hall.

But that's rarely how it goes. At each intersection, as I approach the crosswalk, I evaluate if the light's about to change for or against us, or if we have the white human outline or the red palm facing us from the signal across the street. If it looks like we'll be standing for a while, I veer right and go up a block, seeing if I can catch the next signal up (or down, on the way home). I don't go above Fourth or below Houston because that would be adding distance. Every couple hundred yards there's another need to analyze the intersection. No two trips the same.

Okay, I'll admit it's weird and obsessive. But who wants to stand there waiting for a light to change?

On the way home from class today I encountered this guy, walking his dog up Great Jones.

Even other jaded Manhattanites, who've seen everything, turned to look. That's really saying something.

Toward the end of my walk I passed the old Marble Cemetery on Second, just east of Second Avenue. Two mayors and a Roosevelt are buried in there.

As are the last remains of someone named Preserved Fish.

I had to look this up. Maybe some merchant who changed his name as a branding gimmick?

Nope, that's what his parents named him, when he was born in 1766 in Massachusetts.

Apparently his parents were goofy Great Awakening types, who came up with the name as in "preserved from sin".

He made his nut in whaling and whale oil, although I guess that isn't really a fish. He went on to become a bank president and Tammany Hall mover and shaker, and was apparently a difficult character in his day, with lots of family drama to boot. And, of course, he was a good Episcopalian.

I'm really going to miss this place.