When I walk across the Wakefield Avenue Bridge, high above the Bronx River, the Metro-North Railroad tracks and a long-abandoned patch of woods, I always stop to marvel. Fifty feet from the ground, the skeleton of a child’s bicycle hangs, its frame embedded deep in the tree trunk. Once upon a time, some little boy left his bike in the weeds and a seedling tree on its way skyward simply absorbed it. There’s a technical name for this: edaphoecotropism. It turns out the omnivorous tree beneath the Wakefield Bridge is not alone. A website devoted to “Trees Eating Things” – road signs mostly, but junked cars and even a rifle – serves a “community” of people who celebrate this diet.
New York, like most cities, is built on the remnants of its past. Sometimes these are rescued and celebrated. The Museum of the City of New York is exhibiting 16 murals that once enlivened the children’s ward of Lower Manhattan’s Gouverneur Hospital. Abram Champanier (1896-1960) scored a Works Progress Administration grant in 1938 to paint a fantasy in which Alice and her numerous acquaintances from Wonderland visit New York. They have their own Virgil, named Fabzio, who shows them the town by steamer, subway and airplane. They swarm Coney Island, scale the Statue of Liberty while waving the Stars and Stripes, mount the lions at the steps of the New York Public Library, invade Central Park Zoo and cavort with the animals and reprise the Empire State Building climax of King Kong. The Gouverneur Hospital fell into disuse, sat abandoned for years and was slated for demolition, but in 1981 a team of art-savers snuck in and rescued Champanier’s work. The paintings represent New York City on a vast scale. But like the arboreal bicycle, they are poignant with lost time, not only of the city 88 years ago, but of the children they once entertained in that otherwise grim ward.
Fifteen years ago, New York sparked the “Occupy” movement with “Occupy Wall Street.” Its reverberations ranged from “Occupy Southampton” to “Occupy Anchorage.” The exuberant nihilists of the downtown crowd held out for 59 days. But they were no match for the British occupiers who held the island for seven years after routing George Washington on August 27, 1776. Upstairs from the Alice exhibit at the museum is The Occupied City. I went half expecting the doleful recriminations that marred many of the 250th “celebrations” by our official custodians of the nation’s past. That was, for instance, what I found at New York Public Library’s Declaring America: 1776 and Beyond. It indeed displayed a print of the Declaration of Independence and a handful of other Revolutionary-era artifacts, but 90 percent or more of the exhibit was devoted to later “protest” movements. But the Museum of the City of New York scrupulously stayed on topic. In the prelude to the occupation, the rambunctious colonists de-plinthed the Bowling Green statue of King George. Museum visitors have the opportunity to haul on ropes that, with the right pull, will topple an image of the old monarch. Other imaginative touches include the opportunity to lower the Union Flag and raise the Stars and Stripes in its stead. An excerpt from the video game Assassin’s Creed gives an uncanny walk from Morningside Heights to Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan, during the grim and hungry years of the Occupation. Spoken testimonials by actors portraying historical figures are offered every few yards. These appurtenances are typical of the modern museum “experience,” the purveyors of which don’t trust visitors to feel the gravity of actual artifacts. But I think the curators struck the right balance. The anger and desperation, as well as the pride of the participants, mingled well with the melancholy of such a memorial.
On July 4, my wife and I made it through the madding crowds in Brooklyn to a prime spot – we won the lottery for tickets! – to see the fireworks. We were also well-positioned to see one of the launching pads for the sky-rockets that left the Brooklyn Bridge framed by flames. Perhaps that was a prelude to the weeks of smoke from the Canadian forest fires. King George isn’t through with us yet. The New York Historical – which, in a pique of anti-grammatical showmanship, has eliminated the word “Society” from its name – while moving a seven-foot plaster statue of Thomas Jefferson to an exhibit called “Democracy Matters,” broke off his quill pen. The 1833 statue bounced from one city office to another until 2001, when one member of the city council, Charles Barron, denounced Jefferson as a “slave-owning pedophile” and led the effort to exile it to the New York Historical. Keeping hold of the past is hard work, but if we pay a little attention, the past keeps its hold on us.
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