The Joy of New York: A Travel Book

By Pere Ortís

Amid its impressive skyscrapers and massive avenues, New York is a complex city that can be intimidating, even to its longtime residents. With that said, it is a city that begs to be explored.

Pere Ortis relies on experiences gathered from his thirty years living in New York to share a travel guide that includes entertaining personal stories and historical facts. Ortis leads visitors down a fascinating path where they learn about local landmarks like the Conference House on Staten Island that served as the stage for negotiations between the British and Americans after the Declaration of Independence in 1776; Saint Patricks Cathedral where more than two thousand parishioners can worship within walls that hold incredible history; and the Yorkville District where many still come to live in peace and prosper, just as the German immigrants once did. Included in his tour of the Big Apple is writings about the Brooklyn Bridge, Chinatown and Little Italy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Times Square, and many other local attractions.

The Joy of New York is a colorful collection of travel stories that offers tourists an in-depth glimpse into the history and places that make the Big Apple one of the most interesting places to visit in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480851832

Pere Ortís

Pere Ortís was born in Bellpuig, Catalonia, and completed his studies at NYU. He has lived the majority of his life in New York City, but has also resided in Honduras. Ortis is the author of nineteen novels, three books of short stories, five books of essays, three travel books, four books about the Catalan language, and several translations from Catalan into English and vice versa. He has also published essays in local magazines.

Book preview

The Last Frontier

The ocean has numberless routes. One of the so many routes that plough the sea leads to the city of New York. And we must find this route, among the infinite texture, since it leads us to the bay south of the city, where you cannot detect the source of the Hudson River that empties exactly here and dilutes in the great pool.

Let’s imagine that we arrive in a luxurious liner. As soon as we approach land, the Verrazano Bridge impacts us, hanging upon our heads and inviting the liner into the bay. The Statue of Liberty, at the bottom and to the left hand, invites us to get in as well, raising the torch and smiling to us. Her smile may be ambiguous, like the one of the La Gioconda, saying to us that we are welcome. Anyway, it could be convenient to find out about the smile of the sculptor’s mother since the face of the statue was modeled after her.

This bridge jumps upon what is called the Narrows, the neck of the bottle that is the strait between Brooklyn and Staten Island. It is the door to the large bay, the last step upon the water to access the city of New York. This precise point, from where we look through and under the Verrazano Bridge, is called Lower New York Bay, the vestibule of the port that lies between the states of New York and New Jersey and becomes New York Upper Bay. The perspective that displays to our eyes is like the landscape of a dreamland, as if we are boarding the panorama of an unexpected galaxy, especially if we arrive in a liner at night with immense lights upon our heads and vast lights on the panorama of the ground. This promises us the discovery of incredible findings and countless priceless marvels.

We follow the same itinerary that the European—Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, and German, for example—immigrants did at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The only difference was they did not have to bend down while crossing under the bridge, keeping in their souls the doubt about being welcomed by the good heart of a mother, the Mistress of Liberty. The simple reason is that, depending on the period of the arrival, she was not yet there.

The North Atlantic is the historic conduit the Europeans followed to America, especially toward the United States, land of liberty and great opportunities. The Europeans who were the talents—or those who were not the talents of the old Europe—abandoned their homes while looking for better lives than the ones they’d lived under despotic governments, natural disasters, fanatic religions, or other calamities. That was the product of the medievalism, the ignorance, and the human stupidity of the ones who migrated here.

The vision of that time did not discourage them from coming, whereas nowadays the sense of the stiffness of the bureaucracy that awaits them can discourage people from immigrating. At that time, everything was easier and simpler—everything had its natural and human attraction—and suggested that you had arrived in a country where life had its hard aspects too but was not so aggressive. And you would have to move around if you wanted to prosper. Besides, the dearth of skyscrapers at that time helped create the impression of good human ambience while reaffirming the hope for a better life.

Still on this side of the bridge, we can say, shortly before crossing it underneath, a land of continent stretches at the left hand, which constitutes no less than the fifth borough of New York City, Richmond County, commonly known as Staten Island. It is an island that, according to geography, should belong to New Jersey, but a narrow sound, considered part of the Hudson River, marks the separation of the two states. This sound runs in front of New Jersey toward the south and empties into the ocean near the last corner of the island. This is called, as we noted, the last frontier because it is the only land that has remained exempt from the invasion of the uncontrolled civilization of the not-so-controlled urbanization. And for many years, it continued being full of forest and residential zones of only a few privileged. Some time ago, there were several luxury mansions, now lost in the forest, surrounded by green lawns where the sun poured its light. They breathed pure oxygen inside some dispersed cottages that did not damage the virgin forest exclusive to the whole island. Today it is more urbanized, but let’s hope they did not destroy its original character of an unpolluted piece of nature.

These details cannot be appreciated from the plane coming to New York unless the passenger knows the city well. And besides, it depends on the route the plane follows to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Once Manhattan was planted with so many skyscrapers and strictly urbanized, the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island became the land of promise to the rich ones. Tired of the noise and stressful lives in the great city, they looked for the silence, nature, and peace in the forests of Staten Island. Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx were at the time quiet places for those who worked in Manhattan. By the way, they were the majority, but these counties also entered the working, mercantile, industrial dynamics of the island of Manhattan, and many of their inhabitants turned their attention to move to Staten Island. (Now for the time being, we set apart this island because in this section it does not have any docks for the modern large vessels. But we’ll come back later and not miss it at all.)

I lived on this island from May to September 1969, just having arrived in New York. Here the summertime climate is torrid. In spite of this, I walked several times in a temperature of forty-one or forty-two degrees Celsius from Forty-Third Street in the city to the southern tip of Manhattan, where there’s Battery Park, to take the ferry to Staten Island.

The traditional system to visit this zone has been this ferry, which ties up at the docks at the south of Manhattan and travels to the north of Staten Island, passing the Statue of Liberty at a distance of one hundred feet. The other modern access to this Island is via the Verrazano Bridge, which shores up at the corner of the eastern section of Brooklyn, where Fort Hamilton Parkway ends. And from there, it jumps to the other support to the north of Staten Island. The arch formed by this bridge is really impressive, one of the most spectacular landmarks that this city presents to the visitor.

The Catalan writer Josep Pla, who came on a liner to New York in 1954, got into the estuary of the Hudson River, the port of New York, and believed that the territory that lay on his left was still Staten Island, at the level of the Statue of Liberty, but it is not. It is Jersey City, New Jersey. Beyond the Verrazano, Richmond County finishes. This bridge did not exist in 1954, when Pla traveled his first and only time and entered the port the same way we do now.

The spectacle of the skyscrapers that stood close together in Lower Manhattan vividly impressed Pla. As such a demanding—but also cold and balanced—observer, he burst into exclamations and praises. He justified it by saying he was not an aficionado of cinema and had never seen New York on the big screen. His liner, Guadalupe, anchored in the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, on the western bank of the Hudson River, just in front of the open mouth of Canal Street, Manhattan, on the other side, yawning between the numerous docks and anchored vessels.

It is amazing how Pla, staying here just for a weekend, forged an idea about the city that was so extensive and exact. He moved around in a taxi, accompanied by a New Yorker friend and mentor who surely suggested many of the things Pla wrote; otherwise it cannot be understood.

This port has bestowed its international fame upon New York. Its largess is definitive, and the vessels of a great tonnage move on it easily because of the water depth, the lack of reefs, and the order and civilization, all enticing everybody who reaches this corner of the world so favored by nature. The Hudson River brings freshwater to New York from the northern lakes and mountains through a double conduit, one on each side of Manhattan, in a way that the freshwater benefits New Jersey, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Here the overseas commerce at a large scale began, where the big sailing ships from around the world anchored and departed. The natural conditions of this port—its extension, the water depth, and the multiple points of access—were the fundamental reasons for the greatness and blooming of this city.

It still amazes almost everybody who visits it.

Staten Island

So let’s go to this island, Richmond County, before we get farther away from it. Yes, it is an island that lies a little to the west of the plumb line that descends from the body of the city. Manhattan is oriented from north to south and is practically attached to the state of New Jersey because, as we have said, an arm of the Hudson separates the two places. In fact, this arm of the river is the continuation of a natural canal that stretches in the north and becomes Newark Bay. On the left hand of this bay, a belt of land runs from south to north, and on its western side, the abundant stream of the Hudson River slides toward the sea.

Once we have abandoned the liner that has brought us here—and has possibly anchored in one of the many docks on the southwest littoral of Manhattan—and our baggage is left safety at the hotel, let’s go to the very end of this island of Manhattan so we can take the ferry to Staten Island. And then coming back, we may start its exploration from the bottom going north. The ferry waits for us at the wharf at the end of Battery Park. It is a ship of some solemnity, with capacity for a great number of passengers, possibly three thousand. It has many halls and seats on the first and second floors, along with a basement that is a solid ground tunnel to contain and support several automobiles traveling to the same place.

In the 1970s, this transport was a nickel and later a quarter, and today it is free. I believe it’s because of a gentleness of City Hall trying to promote tourism to the bay and Staten Island. This one isn’t so easy to get in. It does not include the charming landmarks of Manhattan, but it is very interesting for the wisdom it has shown preserving its forests and its aspect of living nature. I don’t believe, though, that the cars travel for free.

Shortly after the ferry sets sail, an island blocks much of the view of the bay, to the left side, where today many more buildings rise than they did some time ago. It is Governor’s Island, where the headquarters of the coast guards was before, the ones who supervised this port and its environment when most of the immigrants arrived in the country.

But soon the panorama of the entire section appears to our eyes, and this way, we can identify all the landmarks that cause the tourists’ admiration. Besides the island blocked the whole vision of the Verrazano because of the new high buildings it has now. From Battery Park, the high towers that support the bridge can be seen, but not its complete structure. Now yes, we enjoy contemplating the whole vision of this daring peace of engineering.

In the sunlight, the aspect of this bay is magnificent, but many prefer it at night due to the beautiful constellations that form the nearby and faraway lightings, mostly the one of the Verrazano hanging over there from tower to tower and presiding with its cords of lights tracing wide and elegant arches. The one of Coney Island is to the left, infinite and lost in the deep night. We see the one on the island where the Statue of Liberty stands with the hanging bunches of lights from the pedestal of the statue. We observe the one of the ships that sails in one sense or the other. And we see the ones of the towns of New Jersey. All of them make an ocean of glowworms, the dust of the stars, that fades more and more toward the deep darkness to the west. All of it impresses the souls, making the illusion that they navigate between two skies, the one upon the heads and the other at your own level.

Soon we slide in the water, almost touching the island of the Statue of Liberty, but we do not land on it because this boat is an express to Staten Island. We have another period of sailing, yet we look at the aspects of the port changing continually and offering new angles and perspectives to our eyes, always interesting and pretty. The ferry stops the motors at some distance from the dock, and we can observe the maneuver of the expert who inserts it in the funnel and stops it right in the fitting bottom.

Here now, day and night, you can take taxis or busses. Staten Island does not have a subway at all. Or you can use your car, if it traveled with you. When I lived here, oftentimes I walked home from this point, following Forest Avenue, unless I had something to do where I lived on Castleton Avenue. And in that case, I took the bus.

Forest Avenue runs besides Clove Lake Park, an extensive green land that is a resting zone, also a bird sanctuary, with real forests, gardens, ample sections of grass, and the complex of lakes, where a man, battled by life, can find rest, silence, and peace. The island has six or seven lakes and some other parks.

I hope that today everything has been respected by the invasion of urbanization and keeps on living. I used to come to this park every afternoon, and while walking during the trip, I toned up my body and invigorated my brain. City Hall is very astute to keep these green areas and equips them with entertainment for children, like swings, small toboggans, little houses for young girls, small fairy castles for grown-up men, and so on. City Hall also built here a torrent that hurls its water down upon and between rocks that it has brought in via previous works by means of its team of builders, professionals who really know what they are doing, never individuals who have no experience of gardens and produce batches that make you run away, as it happens in many public places of my country, where the impression one gets is that they hate trees by the way they suppress them.

This park is unique in the area of New York because it stands upon a hill, which, believe it or not, is the highest point along the extension of the East Coast of the country from Nova Scotia to Miami. Though it is not that high over the plains that surround the city of New York and extend until the faraway evanescent mountains that one meets going upstate, several other hills rise in Staten Island. The land of the East Coast in the United States is flat to the sea and some distance inland, never having altitudes either of mountains or cliffs, which could make a vague reference at many others existing overseas.

I know—for example and because I was in it—the eastern littoral of Florida is absolutely flat, not presenting any other remarkable geographic variety but beaches of sand. I know the territory on the West Coast is the same way.

Walking down the northern slope of this park, we meet Casselton Avenue at one of the corners of which the Church of the Sacred Heart stays. It’s a kind of a building that seems like a medieval castle with its walls of red stone tending to a cherry color, an indigenous mineral, a set of factors that gives an aristocratic aspect to it. You cannot define which of the classic styles it is built after.

Before I came here, this neighborhood was rather of a middle conservative class, inhabited by old and typical Americans, hardworking and peaceful people in love with their overseas wars won by their marines, as it seems to be usual to American patriots. I say this at the end of the sixties, coming here from Honduras after twelve years of living there. I went to the chancery of the Diocese of New York to offer my services as a priest, and they sent me to this parish.

At that time, I was thirty-eight, and I did not speak any English. Here, all the services were in English. My situation, my struggle to cope with my obligations, can be imagined. It was a very hard period of my life, yet convenient and profitable. It was really challenging, but I survived it. They scheduled me right away to celebrate mass on the weekdays and Sunday parish masses. It was like when somebody pushes you to the water and you cannot swim, but you have to swim if you want to get out of it, that is,, to survive. I could see the faithful suffered while I was reading to them a written homily by an American priest, but I suffered more than they did.

And to make things more pleasant, the pastor in that church was an outstanding conservative, always dressing in his monsignor soutane with the red ribbons from top to bottom. He was adviser to Cardinal Cooke, and I could never see him moving in the house not wearing his distinguished dress. He was a character, serious, demanding, and obstinate in his own opinion.

The day after I came to the house, I went down to ask some questions from the lady secretary in her office, and suddenly the monsignor appeared over there. After looking at me not wearing my clergyman uniform, he said to me, stretching his arm to point out the staircase to my floor, Go up and wear your Roman collar!

It was summer and warm to the point that you had no oxygen to breathe. The climate of New York at summertime is suffocating, and during winter, it is cold as the North Pole.

And a few days later, he called me to his room to make some indication to me, and I found him seated in his recliner, wearing just one of his underwear pieces. The rest of his body was naked, just as he was born. And I said to myself, Neither that much nor this little. Let’s be more balanced, please. It was a matter of domestic easiness, American-style.

Because of his floury skin and the absolute absence of hair on it, he looked like a baby with an uncontrolled mentality and one with a very limited scope. It was that thing of the Yankee innocence, immodesty, concepts so well combined by the one who has made the experience about them. And that gets complicated with the concept of naïveté, which the foreigners consider congenital in the locals.

Another day, we were discussing at the table whether President Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy as involved or not. I argued yes, and he argued no. He said no because the mass media said no and those in the high key places in the government said no. I had no words in English to defend my point of view, so I abandoned the discussion. By the way, I did not agree to his opinion by the same reasons he was thinking no. Later on, maybe in a couple of years or three, when I was far away from the place, Reader’s Digest issued an article in which its author proved that at least two, besides Oswald, shot President Kennedy, one from the mouth of a sewer beneath the sidewalk and another from behind the fence of a garden near the street.

Because I could not express myself in English, he and the other personnel in the house considered me as a minus habens (loser), and they looked at me with skepticism and infinite compassion, like a poor element unable to grasp the issues in his right substance.

At that time only a few Spanish people were on Staten Island, and on this section of Casselton Avenue, even fewer were available to make a social group. Or they did not make noise, and you could not see them much because they were at work, serving in the houses around.

As a matter of fact, during the four months I was in this parish, I never contacted any of them. And now I admit that I could be guilty of not looking for them. They could not come to me in their troubles. I had lived in Honduras twelve years in a row before, and if I did not fall in love with her, I surely needed their simple, attentive, and affable company. To call them to the parish as a group was not possible, for obvious reasons of genius and mentality. Either it was not possible to begin a parish activity of service to them, like a mass in Spanish on Sundays, organizing some society with them. I knew that in Brooklyn, for example, large communities of Spanish existed in the parishes, and my attention was fixed over there. My intention was to learn English—the sooner the better—and get acquainted with the Anglo-Saxon culture all right, but I had the intuition that I had to do it with much precaution and in another environment where I could get more humanity and a company more fitting to me.

Staten Island does not even reach a half-million inhabitants today. Though the ferry now is free, going every day to work in Manhattan and coming back is so bothersome. And if you drive over Verrazano Bridge, you pay thirteen dollars each time, and today you may pay more than that. As we have said, there are still forests and artificial parks built with plausible skillfulness and the due respect to Mother Nature. People concentrate in Richmond Village, the urban nucleus of the island, where twenty-eight houses of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries have been restored, an asset that entitles the neighbors to consider their town to have an ancient interest, to the extent that some of them dress the way their ancestors did when showing the monuments to the tourists, explaining to them the difficulties and headaches that Staten Island suffered from the beginning of the colony and clarifying those hardships they themselves have endured.

So on the island, there are a couple landmarks of historic interest that cannot be minimized. The Conference House was the stage of the negotiations between the British and the Americans after the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as they looked for an understanding toward peace. The conversations failed, and the building, which had been constructed in 1680 for a retired British naval captain, was turned into a museum.

The Garibaldi Meucci Museum is named after the revolutionary Italian promoter of Italian national unity. He lived on Staten Island for two full years in the 1850s after he was expelled from his homeland. Garibaldi Meucci was making a living manufacturing candles and inhabiting this house. Some letters and other items are kept, all belonging to the time he lived here.

Also a museum displays Tibetan art that gathers religious articles of the people of Tibet. It was founded by Miss Edna Coblentz after she discovered twelve little Tibetan statues, all forgotten in the attic of her house, all brought here by her sailor grandfather. The collection was sufficient to infuse the fancy on her. Excited by her discovery, she began to collect them.

Verrazano Bridge

This bridge was constructed during the 1960s. During a visit to New York in 1965, I was able to contemplate the colossal scaffolds that had been supported on the water or maybe through the water until they met the consistent rock on the bottom. They had already built half of the bridge’s structure. It was some spectacle to admire, missing the notion of time and the space.

Giovanni da Verrazano, also spelled Verrazzano, was an Italian explorer born in Florence who navigated under the name of the French crown. He made important explorations through all the East Coast of Central and North America. And with an idea similar to that of Christopher Columbus, he was looking for a shortcut in the north to the Oriental Indies. Afterward, in his return to the tropics and on an island in the region of Darien, some Caribbean Indians ate him and valued the quality of his proteins far above those of the armadillo and even superior to those of the iguana, unbelievable as it may sound. He possibly explored a pass from one ocean to the other in Darien, which could be the embryo of the Panama Canal.

When I was back to New York in the summer of 1968, the bridge was functioning at least for a couple years. It jumps five kilometers upon the sea. Two sculptural columns underpin it through the water. Each column was doubled in a very elegant shape from the bottom to the top, where the cables that support the solid base of the bridge cling to. It has two floors for the transit in both directions and three lanes in each. From the ground, one can appreciate staying on the roads that cross beneath the two ends of the bridge and the balance and security with which the trucks of a great tonnage circulate through the first floor, which is exclusive for them. The upper one is exclusive for everyone else. The tourists contemplate the marvel with their mouths open.

As I said, the bridge flies from Brooklyn to Staten Island and jumps upon what is the neck of the bottle that is the entrance to the bay. It is a very large neck indeed, and it is the most rapid and efficient way to get onto the New Jersey Turnpike, in which you merge into the heavy traffic going south, the great road that leads in all directions. This turnpike is the spinal cord of the state of New Jersey. The bridge is the more convenient shortcut for those who come from Long Island or want to move south from Brooklyn or nearby Queens.

Besides, this bridge is an attraction to the eyes of those who move in the five boroughs, except the Bronx, from which it cannot be seen, let alone from the towns on the southern coast of New Jersey. It is mainly visible because of the two high double columns that support its cables. It is the reference point for those who drive on the southern end of the city, to the extent that it causes more impact because of its dearness than the Golden Gate in San Francisco. This was before the number one, and it enjoyed a great prestige all around the country, even all around the world.

The Statue of Liberty

The ferry to Staten Island never goes underneath the Verrazano Bridge since, before reaching it, it turns to the right to dock there. Now we start our voyage of return to Manhattan exactly from the line of it within the port. The Statue of Liberty rises in the middle of the bay, a little bit to the eastern coast of the neighbor state, New Jersey. Standing on a little island, its body measures 138 feet, not counting the pedestal. It gets its green color from the bronze being exposed to the elements. Its feet are cemented to the pedestal by means of hooks, and her left hand holds a metal plate where the date of independence is inscribed.

She was a gift from France to celebrate with the American people the emancipation from the United Kingdom after the bloody war. In such an emancipation, French people saw a triumph of their revolutionary ideas, and the statue was a symbol of liberty and peace as a universal gift. They saw on it the