FIVE POINTS, COLLECT POND, GANGS & MORE - MANHATTAN

Manhattan’s Chinatown is currently a thriving community of shops, restaurants, and businesses, but it was once part of the notoriously shabby Five Points district.  The actual Five Points – made up of the intersection of five streets – no longer exists because one of those five streets (Little Water Street) is now covered by various court buildings.  But the intersection remains.  Columbus Park (formerly Five Points Park) is located there.  The park is basically a cemented area – one of many in Manhattan which are referred to as parks – where you’ll find a basketball court, cement tables where people play chess, and make note, a public restroom.

When the British took over New Amsterdam (1664), renaming it New York, the area of Chinatown, parts of Tribeca, and parts of the Court district were covered by Collect Pond.  This was a spring-fed, freshwater pond 60 feet deep that supplied New York farmers and merchants with their water.  The pond is gone, but the springs are still there, so next time you are in Chinatown you can think about walking on water.

As the town grew in the 18^th century, merchants built homes near the edge of the pond in what would later be called Five Points to enjoy the water.  That is, until the tanners, slaughterhouses and breweries on Bayard Street started dumping their waste matter into the water, polluting it until the water was unusable and stank.  The homeowners were disappointed as was the owner of Coulthard Brewer (aka “Old Brewery) and searched for a solution in the courts. 

The value of real estate being of primary influence in New York, and after some lobbying of the politicos, it was decreed that the pond should be filled in.  Unfortunately, the job, probably done by government bid, was done poorly.  Shortly after the pond was buried, methane gas escaped the landfill, the stink of which finally drove the sensible and prosperous tenants to move to more habitable parts of the island.  Their homes were left to be inhabited by those less fortunate who would tolerate not only the smell of the methane, but the smell of the slaughterhouse and the tanneries (a ripe cheese smell) and the sewage and carcass matter that bubbled up from the pond through the earth on rainy days. 

Dozens of people moved into what became “boarding houses,” living on the second floors and above while pigs, chickens, and goats were housed on the ground floor.  Hence they could answer the phrase, “were you raised in a barn?” with a resounding “yes I was.”  When the “Old Brewery” closed down and was abandoned (although it is certain that other breweries continued in existence), the building was turned into a tenement in which there was one murder every night for fifteen years.  I supposed one had to have suicidal tendencies to rent there.  That building has been torn down, otherwise it would probably be on a “ghost tour.”

The Irish and freed slaves were the majority of tenants who made Five Points as home – mainly because they were not readily welcome in others part of Manhattan.  They integrated in the houses and tenements and mixed socially.  [Their dances – the African shuffle and the Irish jig developed into tap dancing.]

Five Points became the most densely populated area of Manhattan.  It was also the Sixth Ward and the Irish formed gangs that influenced voters to elect Irishmen to city offices.  This would eventually lead to the rise of Irish domination of New York politics, Boss Tweed and the hyper-inflated building of Tweed Courthouse (still standing and available for view on Chambers Street between Broadway & Centre Street) as well as Irish domination of the police force.  The Irish Catholic churches formed schools demanding that the Irish rise intellectually. 

The Irish gangs fought against each other and there were riots.  One of them, the Dead Rabbits Riot of 1857, started at 40-42 Bowery (home of the Bowerie Boys).  Those houses are still standing and just for the sake of history might be worth a look if you’re in the neighborhood. 

The gangs also competed with each other in the manner of firefighting, each trying to reach the fire first and going so far as to turn over each others trucks, thus allowing the fire to demolish a building and possibly kill a few people so that everyone came out an equal loser.  Wooden buildings began to be replaced by brick ones and the 19^th century architecture currently houses tenants and stores in modern Chinatown, but you have too look past signs.

The first Chinese tenant in Five Points was Ah Ken, who started a cigar-rolling business.  As the business prospered, other Chinese men came to work for him and to start their own cigar-rolling businesses.  One man started a laundry and other followed.  The men were willing to live in the squalor that was Five Points to earn a living as the Irish and African Americans moved uptown.  The Chinese immigrants started their own markets, theaters, and gangs.  Their gangs, called tongs, were social, political and sometimes criminal, but the had nothing to do with the fire department luckily. 

Of course, the Chinese immigrants were no more welcome than the Irish or freed slaves or any other immigrant willing to take lower wages than anyone else, but the Chinese were the only ones to have a law passed preventing immigration.  The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and only repealed in 1943.  The act suspended immigration so that there would be no more legal Chinese immigration, and men already in the US could not bring their wives to live with them, and if the men left the US to visit their families, it was difficult for them to return.

A few Chinese women lived in Five Points, wives who had managed to get to the US before the law, but many were prostitutes who were smuggled into the country.  According to the 1900 census, there were 7028 Chinese men in Five Points and 142 women.  In some ways, it must have been like a male prison – men only, limited resources, glass walls all around instead of iron bars. 

But still, they managed to prosper.

post by Alana Cash

CHINATOWN - MANHATTAN

Photo by Hu Totya

You exit the subway on Canal Street to immediate noise – car engines, diesel engines, honking, screeching, sirens, yelling, talking, and the general din of New York.   Canal Street leads to the Manhattan Bridge (the Brooklyn Bridge knockoff that carries the subways out of and into Brooklyn as well as cars and busses) so there's loads of traffic.  Chinatown may not have more people crowding the sidewalks than other parts of Manhattan, but it feels like it because the sidewalks and streets off Canal Street are narrower than uptown tourist places like Times Square and Rockefeller Center.  Those narrow streets add a sense of mystery and romance, most particularly after sunset when the neon lights and colored bulbs come on highlighting all the signs in Chinese script.  You could be somewhere far away.

Unless you live there, Chinatown is two-square miles of shopping, eating, and getting a cheap massage.  The most visible shopping spills out onto the sidewalks of Canal Street between Baxter and East Broadway.  Purses, backpacks, cheap jewelry, and sunglasses (umbrellas as soon as it starts to rain) sit on tables or hang from racks.  As you walk past these hole-in-the-wall stores whose doors roll up like garage doors, the hawkers invite you to buy and to bargain for a price.  These stores all sell basically the same merchandise that changes out every few weeks.

Canal Street in Chinatown is also where you can get a knockoff designer purse, wallet, watch, keychain, shoes, etc.  If you’re interested in that, just stand on any street corner and within a few seconds, someone will whisper, “Handbag? Handbag?  Watch?” and show you a wrinkled photographic menu of designer items.  If you get hooked, you follow someone to the back of a shop, or to a van parked on The Bowery, or down an alleyway to a door.  You’ll have a variety of Louis Vuitton, Coach, Chanel, or other famous brand goods to choose from – in the expensive versions ($hundreds) with genuine leather and brass trim or cheaper ($less and hundreds) which have polyurethane trim that doesn’t wrinkled or stain, but looks obviously fake and ends up in a thrift store instead of on eBay.  You can choose Rolex, Patek Philippe, and other watch brands as well.  Then you can brag that you have a genuine fake something or other.

The designers have boutique stores or have their goods for sale in high-end stores uptown, and they deeply frown at this illicit activity in Chinatown.  The police watch for it and I’ve seen people scatter when a police van arrived.  At one time, the entire block of stores from Baxter to Centre Street were shuttered and padlocked – for months.  It was quite a message. 

Purses and watches are not the only counterfeit items moving through Chinatown.  There’s also a lot of counterfeit money.  I remember once there was a 3-card-Monty game under a construction “shed” (what New York calls covered scaffolding).  I played that scam the first time I visited New York.  I broke even because there was a police car nearby and and I got him to come over and tell the man to return the money he’d cheated from me.  But I digress.  There was a game going on under the scaffolding on lower Broadway near Canal Street.  A tourist had been suckered into playing, but oddly, he was winning.  The crooks running the game were paying out.  It was fascinating and I stood there until I figured it out.  They were giving him counterfeit money.  Two counterfeit $20 bills for a real one.  They wouldn’t get caught passing counterfeit money, the tourist would have that wonderful experience.  I walked over to the Chinatown police precinct and suggested they send someone to play 3-card-Monty on lower Broadway.  This is a floating game all over midtown as well.  Anywhere there are crowds of tourist,s there is a Monty game.

Back to the good stuff.

There are a lot of massage places in Chinatown where you can get a very inexpensive one-hour reflexology session.  That was my weekly event.

I also did grocery shopping in Chinatown.  Along Canal from Baxter to Mulberry I chose from various tiny fresh vegetable and fruit stands at the edge of the sidewalk.  There were two fish markets side by side near Baxter Street.  And, one 3-floor general store that sold maybe 100 types of tea – loose tea in huge glass jars, loose tea in packages, and boxes of teabags.  They sold over 100 types of candy as well as cookies, spices, canned food, etc. 

There was at one time a terrific store on Lower Broadway called Pearl River.  It carried Chinese silk clothing, household products, beauty products all sorts of wonders on two floors creaky wooden floors.  There was plenty of space for wandering around, and it was a flow-through, meaning you could enter on Broadway and exit at the other end of the store onto Mercer Street.  Unfortunately, the rent was raised on this 30,000 square foot store from $100,000 per month to $500,000 per month (yes, that’s right, per month), and they closed down.  You can find Pearl River online though:  http://pearlriver.com/v3/index.asp

There used to be a lot of unique shops on lower Broadway – art dealers selling prints, boutiques owned by the designers who sold their own clothes there, music stores, rare book stores, and even a holographic “museum.”  All gone now because of high rents.  The chain stores have moved in – The Gap, American Apparel, Starbucks.  You could be at a mall in Kansas.

After shopping, comes hunger.  Sometimes I cruised south of Canal looking for a restaurant – there are many, but my favorite restaurant was actually Vietnamese – on Centre Street just south of Walker Street.  It was always crowded at lunchtime, so I tried to get there in the afternoon when there was a lull.  I liked to sit at a two-top table near the cash register and have a Vietnamese coffee (espresso dripped into condensed milk).  

And, more often than not, before going home, I stopped into Pearl Paint.  This is a multi-story art store on Canal Street near Broadway.  It has old wide-plank floors that creak, every kind of art supply you can imagine, and quite possibly the rudest staff you can find in New York.  Overcoming that, I went there to buy gel pens because they had a selection of 100s of colors and I used them up quickly.

More to come on Chinatown…

THE PEOPLE YOU MEET - CHESTER

Once the weather was nice – meaning no further threat of a snowstorm – people claimed their spots on the sidewalk in my neighborhood.  There was a line of men who sat on chairs, wheelchairs, or on the seat of a walker along a storefront on Lincoln Avenue. One man was particularly friendly and always called hello whenever I passed by.  

Around the corner and down the block on Flatbush Avenue, there were a couple of permanent kitchen chairs outside the barber shop, usually filled with men complaining about one thing or another.  They never spoke to me, but looking inside the barber shop it always seemed like a party was going on.  

On Parkside Avenue, where there was a sort of crummy grocery store, sometimes I might pass gang members – there was a shooting there one afternoon while I was shopping, once there was a hooker laying on the sidewalk (saw that in Manhattan too).  Once, I was propositioned once in a very vulgar way by a large sweaty man getting on a bus.  Good luck, buddy.

Walking down Ocean Avenue on a warm day, I might find Chester standing underneath the awning of the apartment building where he lived. He was friends with my landlord so I had been formally introduced and we always chatted whenever I saw him.  He’d lived in the neighborhood for forty years and he told me all about the changes that had happened

He told me that some of the apartment buildings along Ocean Avenue had doormen and carpets and furniture in the lobbies.  Now they were lucky if the front door actually locked and the elevators were running.  The lobbies were now floored with cheap linoleum and empty of all furniture.

I remember one day Chester was just chatting about his foot hurting, then changed the subject, saying, “Hitler was sitting on my refrigerator this morning for three hours.  Yes, he was only 12 inches tall and he sat on the top of the fridge from 9 o’clock until noon.  I tried not to look at him, but I could see him out of the corner of my eye.  I went out of the kitchen for a long while, checking every once in a while to see if he was still there, and finally he was gone.” 

Well, that certainly surprised me. 

Another day he told me about some crows three feet tall that flew in his bedroom window and spent the night.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say during some of his conversation, but I sure did find him interesting.

Post by Alana Cash

OUTDOOR PARTIES AND TARGET PRACTICE

As the weather grew warmer, I used to sit at the window in the eat-in kitchen with the windows open.  That’s an important term in New York – “eat in.”  It means you don’t have to fit a dining table in your living room somewhere.  The eat-in kitchen was formerly a bedroom, so it was a nice size, and it had a bay window overlooking the back garden.  It was a very pleasant place to work.

The trees at the back of the garden, disguised the wall to the subway ditch that were just beyond them.  And beyond the subway ditch was a one-block street that began at Flatbush Avenue and ended at the subway ditch.  This was a special street – one that I never visited.  Because…

One morning as I was sitting at the kitchen table working with a manuscript, I began to hear gun fire.  I don’t know that I’d ever heard gunfire before that in Brooklyn, but I’d heard it many times as I passed the shooting range on Lamar Blvd. and Koenig Lane in Austin, Texas.  It sounds a bit like firecrackers, a bit like a car backfiring, all depending on caliber, but it is distinctive. 

The shots I heard that morning were not sporadic and then stopping – like someone was committing a crime.  The shooter shoots and then runs.  No, this was consistent for quite a while – maybe 30 minutes.  This was target practice.  I couldn’t see who was firing because of the trees and the concrete walls on either side of the ditch, but it seemed there were two pistols – two shooters just having a nice morning without having to pay to go to a shooting range.  Note to self, avoid this block.

Later on in the summer, when the nights were muggy and hot, this same block had a block party (every year).  Someone put a few 6-foot speakers on the sidewalks and blared hiphop music joyously until 3 or 4 a.m.  I know my landlord called the police to complain and I’m sure plenty of other neighbors called as well.  But the NYPD did not respond to the noise complaints.  It seemed that, for some reason, this block was untouchable.  Perhaps a politician lived on it – a city council member or someone on the mayor’s staff. Or it was gang controlled.

Admittedly, I could not hear the party at the front of the house where I slept and where there was traffic noise to deal with so I didn’t call about that noise.  My torture was the hiphop circus that arrived every June for three weeks.  Pitching a plastic “big top” in the park directly across the street, they held 3 performances a day that could be heard on the moon.  The night-time performances were supposed to end at 10pm, but ended whenever they were finished.  It was awful, and thankfully, new construction in the park put an end to that. 

WEEKSVILLE PRE-CIVIL WAR AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

When I first moved to New York, I read every book I could get my hands on that was about the City, both current and historical.  That’s how I learned about the Hunterfly Houses in Weeksville – a small section of Brooklyn considered part of Crown Heights and bounded by Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville.  Weeksville was described as a Pre-Civil War African-American community.  The homes still standing are on the Register of Historic Places and Weeksville is officially called Hunterfly Road Historic District.    

I found the address for the Hunterfly Houses in a well-respected guidebook.  It was about 3 miles from where I was living and I decided to walk there through Brownsville – traveling north on Ocean Avenue, continuing on where it turned into Empire Avenue, until I reached Utica St. and turned north.  That took me to the address in the guidebook, but not to the houses – because, guess what, that guidebook was wrong.  I asked people I met on the street if they knew where the Weeksville houses were and no one in the neighborhood seemed to know.  So I walked around for about an hour until I found them at 1698 Bergen Street which was not the addressed listed in the book.  The houses were closed on the day I walked up there – a fact the guidebook also neglected to mention – and they were surrounded by an iron fence with a locked gate, so I couldn’t even get a close look at the exterior or peer in the windows.  (I wrote a letter to the guidebook publisher later when I got home).

1698 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY

Weeksville was founded in 1830 by freedman James Weeks, and the wood-frame homes that are still standing (and restored) date from that period up to 1880s.  By 1850s, Weeksville was a thriving community of 500 people with a school, newspaper, cemetery (you have to wonder what is now built on top of it), old-age home, and a female doctor. 

The buildings still standing most likely constituted “town square.”  Certainly, they represent a rural life in Brooklyn which is almost impossible to imagine with every square inch now covered in concrete and brick.  That was my interest.  To see and imagine historic New York.  My family owned a farm in Arkansas – without running water or electricity until 1959 – and the kids went to a one-room school house.  That area of Arkansas has satellite dishes and paved roads now, but it still feels very rural.  So it was interesting to imagine Brooklyn without electricity or indoor plumbing.

 

Hunterfly Road (anglicanization of  Dutch “Aander Vly”) was an Indian trail that led from Bedford to Jamaica Bay.  As the City of Brooklyn grew and the grid for expansion laid out, Hunterfly Road began to be enclosed by construction of homes and buildings.  That’s how Weeksville eventually seemed to disappear.  It was rediscovered by a professor at Pratt Institute who was in an airplane taking a view of New York from the air.  That discovery initiated a movement to restore and preserve the houses at a cost of $3 million.  That seems like a lot since there are only three houses. 

There is now a 19,000 square foot Weeksville Heritage Center.  You have to wonder what the original residents of Weeksville would have thought of that.

CROWN HEIGHTS HASIDIC LUBAVITCHER TOUR

I had seen men in the diamond district of Manhattan and on the subway with side locks, wearing long-sleeved white shirts, black pants, long black coats, and black hats.  In winter this clothing seemed warming; in summer I felt it would be unbearably hot.  This is the style of clothing of the Hasidic and there is significance to it.

There are several Hasidic communities in Brooklyn – Borough Park and Williamsburg are quite large.  The community nearest me was Crown Heights.  I wanted to learn the significance of the side

locks, and so one Sunday I took the Lubavitcher Tour - a walking tour of the Crown Heights Hasidic Community.

 

A group of use – four tourists and me – met the tour guide on Kingston Road, not far from the temple on Eastern Parkway.  When I reached out to shake the hand of the tour guide, he ignored it without a word of explanation.  I learned later on in the tour, that there is a prohibition about the different genders touching and strong segregation of men and women.  Perhaps he expected me to know this already.

First, the tour guide taught us about the different communities in Brooklyn, the importance of the rabbi and how he is chosen.  He explained one distinction between Hasidic Jews and other types of Judaism is that Hasidic men are not to shave the five corners of the head which includes the beard.  There are differing opinions on what the five points are (learned online), but one is very clear – the sideburns are not to be shaved.  They become ringlet side locks.  

We walked around the neighborhood a bit before we went inside the temple to the women’s section – upstairs and separate from the males.  There were windows in the room that overlooked the main temple.  The windows were covered except for a small opening at the bottom.  The tour guide explained that the women could “look down into the temple and pick out their husbands.” 

Marriages are arranged with strong guidance from the families for picking the right mate for life.  After a woman is married, she must cover her hair even at home.  In this community, women did not have to shave their heads, as I recall.  Although I have read that in other Jewish communities, the married women shave their heads and cover them with wigs.

The tour guide also explained the teffilin – black leather boxes attached to leather straps that get wrapped about a man’s head so that the box is on his forehead or wrapped about his arm.  The boxes hold parchment scrolls with verses from the Torah (to me, the first five books of the Old Testament) and are worn during prayer.

After visiting the temple, we went to a place where men make mezuzahs.  A mezuzah is a small piece of parchment with a verse from the Torah printed or written on it.  Usually the parchment is inside a decorative case that is about 3 or 4 inches long and about ½ inch wide.  The cases are made of different metals and woods, and the ones these men were working with, were elaborately engraved.  The mezuzahs are attached to door frames, outside and inside the home, in a very particular way – usually tipped.

There is so much I’m leaving out because the tour was at least two hours, but eventually we headed back to the starting point and parted.

Shortly after that tour, I met a group of five Hasidic children in Prospect Park on afternoon.  There is a holiday that the children celebrate by offering blessings and these children were running around doing that.  Their guardian was a young man in his late twenties. 

One angelic little boy ran up to me joyously and gave me a blessing.  The man hurried over and asked me, “Are you Jewish?”  And I said, “No.”  The little boy was only supposed to dispense his blessings to those declaring themselves Jewish, but it had already happened and the little boy was so happy.  The man could see that I was happy too, and he said, “That’s all right.”

And I kept that blessing. 

   

THE PARADISE OF BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN

There is a small gate at the corner of Flatbush and Ocean Avenues, and when you pass through it, you enter a paradise of peace and beauty.  The trash and asphalt of the street are no longer visible.  The constant din of the City may continue, but somehow you don’t hear it.  The moldy, diesel smell of the streets is replaced with the smell of green – 1000s of trees, shrubs, and plants providing oxygen, most of them labeled with their names and genus.  This is Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a 52-acre sanctuary in the heart of the borough.  The Garden was created in 1910, the very same year that the house where I lived was built.

It’s flanked on the north by the main Brooklyn Library and the Brooklyn Museum.  Ebbets Field baseball stadium – now replaced by a huge, nondescript, high-rise apartment building – used to be two blocks away to the east.  To the west, right across the street, is Prospect Park a world away.  The Botanic Garden is fenced, iron fenced, and so there’s no itinerants walking through to get somewhere else.  No cars driving through, taking a shortcut to somewhere else.  No speed bikers yelling at you to get out of their way.  When you’re in the Garden, you’re there in nature for nature.

And to the south about a quarter of a mile, another landmark, is the house where I lived.

In the spring, the 100-foot avenue of cherry trees is in bloom.  Brides get married here.  Some others probably get engaged.  And there is a cherry-blossom festival – Sakura Matsuri – that celebrates Japanese culture and gardening with performances and other programs.  Festival days, you will find people in kimonos walking among the cherry trees.  You could be in Japan.

But cherry trees aren’t the only trees that are blooming there in spring.  There are apricot and peach trees, apple and nectarine trees, and magnolias.  It’s really nice.

Photo by Jeffrey O. Gustafson

There’s a Bonsai Museum at the Botanic Garden with over 350 bonsai trees.  Imagine seeing a lilac tree or wisteria blooming in miniature.  Or a fully-grown redwood tree a few inches tall.  I found it so surprising, I tried imagining bonsai people leaning against the trunk.

Photo by BerndH

There’s more – the Aquatic House and Orchid Collection has pools that hold ferns and mosses and orchids.  There are over 2,000 orchids at the Garden.  All equally beautiful.  My landlord grew orchids in the house – about 8 of them, I think – and I tried to learn the technique (purchasing plants from Trader Joe’s).  I just couldn’t get the hang of repotting and when to water, and so I failed.  I suppose it’s similar to baking bread – there’s a certain patience required and something clicks one day and you can do it. Altho I have learned to bake all types of bread, I haven't mastered the art of growing orchids.  And anyway,  bread dough doesn’t die right in front of your eyes.

Photo by Bettycrocker

The most serene part of the Garden for me is Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden.  There’s a large pond with enormous koi swimming in it.  The pond is surrounded by a pathway that is shaded by trees and there’s a shady gazebo for sitting, or leaning, to watch the fish glide by.

There are a lot of festivals and lectures and learning opportunities at the Garden.  One of them is a tour of the Shakespeare Herb Garden which holds every type of plant mentioned in a Shakespeare play or sonnet – including the poisonous ones. 

And then there’s the music.  The Garden includes music in many of their programs.  One winter, I attended a performance by a soft-rock/jazz band.  There was a man sitting near the band who was drawing on a computer.  When the band announced their last song, this man projected his drawings on the wall, sped up the slide-show, and it appeared that the people in the drawings were dancing along to the music.  It was very impressive.

Okay, so the main entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is actually up near the Brooklyn Museum, so there’s two ways to get inside.  But get there.  It’s fabulous.  And open year round.  Tuesdays and Saturday mornings are FREE.  

VOODOO IN THE PARK

One Sunday evening in spring, my landlord knocked on my door and said, “Come with me, I have something to show you in the park.” Although I had made it a point to not enter the park after dark, I was intrigued. I grabbed a jacket and followed him down the stairs and out the front door. We crossed Ocean Avenue and entered the park at Lincoln Avenue. From there we walked onto the grass and into a lightly wooded area.

From a distance I could hear a crowd of people, and as we got closer, I saw a long table laden with flowers, candles, and food. The people milling around it were dressed all in white. The ladies wore long white skirts with long blouses over them and white scarf turbans. The men were in white pants and shirts.

My landlord whispered, “It's a Voodoo meeting.” Voodoo is a Haitian religion, and I was thinking this group could be practicing Candomblé, a South American religion begun in Bahai, or Santaría a creole Caribbean religion. All three of these religions are based African religions – Fon, Yoruba, Bantu – brought to the Western Hemisphere by slaves.

As we got closer to the group, a very friendly woman approached us and said in a Caribbean accent, “Would you like something to eat? Please help yourself?”

I thanked her and declined, feeling nosy and out of place. The landlord had some food.  

“We are having a healing ceremony for a friend who is very sick,” this woman explained. “We just finished.”

I had only seen these kinds of ceremonies in the media – television and movies – and I was sorry I missed it here in the park, mainly because I know that the media exploits African religions, making them scary and silly – a holdover from slavery days. And I would like to have seen this healing ceremony. I never heard about or saw another one.

We only stayed that few minutes and then returned to the house. I doubted I would ever recognize these women if I saw them in the neighborhood. But certainly these people in the park were friendlier and more welcoming than the Christian church members near the house who glared at me, if they looked at me at all, if I happened to pass through the crowd while church was letting out. I never considered attending a service there.

Members of this church near the house were legally permitted to double-park on Sundays, blocking the neighborhood cars until noon. I don't know if this happened with other churches in Brooklyn, but it seemed to me that since public transportation ran on Sundays, they might have been “legally permitted” to ride the subway or busses. Not my call.

I only ever entered the park after dark once after that night. A tall, husky male friend and I walked from Park Slope to Lefferts Gardens at 10 o'clock one evening. We were on a narrow, hilly, dirt trail between a dense wall of bushes and trees on either side. It was really dark and I was really glad when we reached the flat area near Ocean Avenue. I'm pretty brave, but I would never take that walk alone.

Post by Alana Cash

S-P-R-I-N-G

Spring has sprung in New York, when the weather is above 50 degrees and the little portable vestibules outside the doors of restaurants, come down and get stored away for next year.  Until then, there are still bitter cold nights and lots griping about how long winter has lasted.  And then, expected, yet always surprising, the long, beautiful spring starts in March and travels thru July – week-by-week different flowers appearing in gardens and bursting out on the trees before the leaves unfold.  The little portable vestibules are replaced by outdoor tables and chairs on the sidewalks.  

During the winter, the front and back garden of the house where I lived were flat and brown with naked bushes and trees, but in March the shoots began rising green from the earth and there were buds on the trees.  And then for months the flowers came in waves – tulips, daffodils, irises, daisies, zinnias, gladiolas, daylilies, sweet potato flowers – the clematis vines and the passion flower vines flowered – the huge peony and hydrangea bushes flowered like fireworks and the Datona Trumpet tree grew drooping orange flowers.  A grape vine came back to live as well as a wisteria with that intoxicating scent.  The blank dirt back yard became overgrown with just a little winding path to the back where the mulch container was kept.  Every warm day, I set a chair in the middle of the path and worked there, invisible surrounded by nature.  Who would think that living in New York could be like that.

It’s grand weather until August, when there are two or three weeks of high temperatures – meaning somewhere about 95 degrees and heavy humidity that Texans live with eight months out of the year.  And then comes fall, another beautiful, shorter season.  This time, the colors of the leaves replace the beauty of the flowers in the spring.

THE QUAKER CONNECTION

The other day I started reading a biography about Walt Whitman, a Brooklynite of sorts (he was actually born on Long Island and died in New Jersey). I learned that Whitman was a Quaker, and on top of that he met Elias Hicks, the very man whose beliefs split the Quaker Church into Hicksite and Orthodox.  That got my attention because I happen to own the original two pamphlets published in 1824 that concern that split.

The Quaker split was on account of Hicks drift from the official Quaker dogma, and it interested me that religious questing was as discouraged in the early 19^th Century Brooklyn.  This is surprising because I was taught and I believed that our country was founded on religious freedom, and I would expect that less than 50 years after the Revolution, there would be a bit more tolerance of differing religious views.  To me that would mean allowing for personally seeking a greater understanding of the mysteries of existence.  But, no, I found out that when Elias Hicks views caused an uproar.

I did some research on the issue of colonial religion and found out that the Puritans – who brought us the Salem witch trials – were British Anglicans who wanted to reform that State church and were considered cranks because of it.  They left England for the purpose of expressing their religious beliefs more freely and made it against the law to skip Sunday services.  You would think they’d have developed a tolerance because of the way they were treated, but no.  In keeping with religious narrow-mindedness and bigotry, when the Puritans settled in colonial US, they made their religion the State religion and anyone veering from it was considered a heretic which included the Quakers.  One colonial governor went so far as to ask for help in sinking a ship in which Quakers were traveling. 

Having grown up in a home where I was taught that anyone not a Baptist was going to hell, I had a terrible aversion to other religions until I was out on my own and what I knew about Quakerism was limited to oats.  I was curious but afraid of exploring what was taught in those houses of worship that was so bad as to damn their members forever.  One of my great-grandfathers was a minister and he killed someone.  My grandfather was a minister and an adulterer.  I was hard pressed to understand what went on in a Lutheran church or a Quaker meeting that would lead me astray.

I’ve attended many different religious services as an adult, even venturing into a catholic mass or two, and on at least three occasions I attend a Quaker meeting.  All three of the Meetings I attended were Hicksite meetings where the people sat quietly together until someone felt compelled to speak, supposedly no preaching, and I don’t remember any singing either.

The first was in Austin where everyone sat quietly until someone spoke of the government’s policies in the Middle East.  When the meditation ended, I learned that the Meeting was sending a delegation to the Middle East to end or prevent (not sure) the violence there.  I said I thought that might be fruitless and someone explained to me that a delegation of Quakers went to Germany before WWII to speak to Hitler.  Thus making my point. 

The second Meeting I attended was in Santa Monica, California and a third at the Quaker Meeting House (circa 1857) at 110 Schemerhorn in Brooklyn.  During both meeting someone interrupting the meditative silence to speak passionately about politics and errors in political decision-making.  

All in all, the Meetings had a lot of what seemed like preaching to me, but nothing heretical. 

At any rate, I set forth here a quote from one of the pamphlets – this one published by Elias Hicks – The Misrepresentation of Anna Braithwait in Relation to the Doctrines Preached by Elias Hicks Together with the Refutation of the Same in a Letter from Elias Hicks.

Braithwait stated:

            “[Hicks] conceived the writings of Confucius and of many of the philosophers were equally of Divine Revelation with the scriptures; that the heathen nations of the Mahometans, Chinese, and Indian bore greater evidence of the influence of Divine Light than professing Christians.” (pg. 9 of above document)

It sounds so modern (except for the spelling).  And not a word about the government.  

At any rate, I’m glad to own the pamphlets which I found not in Brooklyn, but in Los Angeles.