Category Archives: city

Student protests in Montréal and thoughts about tuition

While in Montréal last week, I heard a lot of unsympathetic comments about the protesting students, who have been upset about what my interlocutors describe as a very small tuition increase — much smaller than the 25% per year that CUNY is going to be undergoing starting in a few months.

There were smoke bombs thrown in the subway one morning we were there — the entire system was shut down during rush hour — and earlier there had been bags of bricks thrown on the tracks, with the same result. Riot police used tear gas and percussion grenades against protesters some weeks before we got there. Faculty and students tell me they have been heckled by protesters, some wearing masks, while trying to enter buildings. (The Montréal city government has proposed banning the covering of one’s face during a protest, and the Canadian government is considering a similar law.) So much class time was lost at some institutions that exams have been postponed and at least one campus (Université de Montréal) has canceled graduation ceremonies.

What is most interesting about this is the clear divide between linguistic-cultural affiliations of the students involved — it is “the French” who are said to believe they are entitled to free education, while some (only some) of the others whose opinions I heard in person or read in the papers want to see the army brought in to deal with the situation.

Feelings about free tuition were once high at CUNY, too. Here is a 2010 description from the New York Times:

CUNY colleges once were known as theaters of unrest. In 1970, students shut off elevator service at Hunter College and liberated the cafeteria by serving free food. Helmeted police officers were called, and classes were suspended. In 1976, as CUNY finally faced an end to free tuition, students marched in the streets of Harlem and boycotted classes for three days, while 13 members of the English faculty started a hunger strike.

In 1989, the possibility of tuition increases led students at City College to pour glue and stick toothpicks into the locks of 400 classrooms. Students seized administration buildings and blocked traffic across the city. In 1991, another series of protests prompted classes to be canceled and commencement to be delayed. (The New York Times, December 20, 2010, p. A23)

There are some other documents here:

  • The 26 September, 1967, issue of The Campus, the CCNY paper, reporting and commenting on the decision to end free tuition. See “Compromise Termed ‘Sellout’ by Head of Alumni Group” (pp. 1-2) and “A CU Grows in Brooklyn” (p. 2). More issues of The Campus may be found at the same site.
  • “When Tuition at CUNY was Free, Sort of,” a 2011 account of the older tuition system and its replacement by financial aid. This account appeared as CUNY was preparing to announce tuition increases.

My view is that when something good — education, for example — has a cost to me, I tend to take it more seriously. That goes for both tuition and homework. I am not arguing in favor of exorbitant tuition or unreasonable workloads, though.

I have also found that people who audit my classes never do all the work assigned, even when they’re strongly motivated, and almost always stop attending before the end of the term. It seems to me that the absence of grade-pressure prevents most people from exerting themselves as much as they might.

Cortlandt Alley’s Chinese name

Cortlandt Alley, a short and very narrow passage running south of Canal Street, is one of New York’s most widely seen streets, having been the scene of innumerable film shoots. It may not be well known that the alley has a Chinese name: Tán Mǐnshēng dào 譚閩生道 “Hon. Thomas Tam Way”. The name was added in late 2009.

Thomas Tam (1946–2008, whose Chinese name means “born in Fújiàn”) was a CUNY trustee and community activist. He held a degree in film-making as well as public health and was the director of many short films. So it is fitting that Cortlandt Alley, a film veteran in its own right, should have had his name added.

A bon mot of Peter Carey about New York (2012)

Peter Carey:

I feel of two worlds, and New York’s a good place to have your heart in two places. I love New York. I go out and get bad tempered at the crowds on Broadway and start snarling at the taxis.

Alexandra Alter, “A Mechanical Duck as a Trojan Horse”, Wall Street Journal, on line at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304451104577392430992501296.html, accessed 20120509.

A mutton chop at Keen’s Steakhouse

The best restaurant meal I have had in some time was served to me two nights ago at Keen’s Steakhouse (36th St. east of 6th Avenue). It was a large mutton chop, cooked medium as the chef suggests and served with stir-fried greens.

The other dishes eaten by my party that night are of no consequence, and the lore of the restaurant and its historical décor, and its staggering prices, you can read about somewhere else. But this was some mutton chop. I can’t recall having eaten a cut of meat with such relish. Not that I have any particular interest in mutton, either, but this was a meal to remember.

Calligraphy in Chinatown

New York’s Chinatown is not generally thought of as a center of high culture — it is where many of us go to get regular doses of better Chinese food than we can make ourselves, and for some kind of validation of our Chinese identities. But here and there you can find the real zìjī 字跡 of famous calligraphers. Here are four, which I’ve supplemented with links to Robert K. Chin’s superb website:

Yú Yòurèn 于右任, scholar and politician, on the Chinese American Veterans Memorial Arch at Kim Lau Square (off Chatham Square). “華裔軍人忠烈坊” [square for soldiers of Chinese descent who died for their country].
Robert K. Chin's image of the Chinese American Veterans Memorial Arch

Cheng Man-ch’ing [Zhèng Mànqīng] 鄭曼青, artist and tàijíquán teacher. on the second-floor sign of the New York T’ai Chi Association, 209 Canal St. “太極拳學社” [Tàijíquán Study Society].
Robert K. Chin's image of the New York T'ai Chi Association

Hu Shih [Hú Shì] 胡適, intellectual historian, on the doorway of the First Chinese Baptist Church 中華第一浸信教會, 21 Pell Street (south side of the street). “紀念堂” [memorial hall].
Robert K. Chin's image of the First Chinese Baptist Church of New York

Chairman Mao [Máo Zhǔxí] 毛主席, on the sign of the Xīnhuá Bookstore 新华书店, 9 Elizabeth St. (west side of street). “新华书店” [Xīnhuá Bookstore]. No image yet, and the same calligraphy is used on all the store’s signs around the world, so this is rather less distinctive.

I’d be glad to hear of any others, and I’ll list them here. Or if you have more detailed photographs, those would be nice, too.

Gotham breakneck to Chinatown

1:50 from Columbia to Canal St., a bit faster than usual. Via Broadway until Union Square, then Fourth Avenue to Bowery/Canal. Chinese coffee on the subway home. Though this type of exercise is less intense and more time-consuming than the elliptical machine, it’s much more soothing to my mind. The elliptical machine is so boring that I have to have something to watch or listen to — my usual choices have been past TV episodes (without the ads) on Netflix, math lectures, and sometimes píngshū 評書. But walking I normally do alone — walking with another person inevitably brings on conversation, and the meditative benefits of the long walk are lost. It’s less important that I not speak, myself, than that my mind be completely open to the music of the street. I always return from these walks feeling rested mentally, my mood expansive, and my body a little tired but very relaxed.

Things seen today: At 20th St. and Bway, SE corner, a garbage man was fiddling with the lock of a hard-shelled brown suitcase that had been left near a city garbage can. When I got near, he wheeled it around and looked at me. “What is this. I don’t trust this.” Nervous chuckle. And then he threw it into the garbage truck.

Class war against the banking and financial industry

When I hear people in banking and finance complain that they are being targeted in a “class war” by calls to tax them and regulate their industry, I remember the words of H.L. Mencken (1880–1956):

The United States is probably the only country ever heard of on earth in which stockbrokers are almost ipso facto members of good society. … In all other societies that I know of they sit below the salt, and in many countries they are thought of as inferior to ordinary business men, and the general attitude toward them is that of suspicion. They are regarded as traders of a peculiarly anti-social type, and that is precisely what they are. But in the United States they belong to the best clubs, and their wives and daughters move in very haughty circles.

[This passage presumably dates to before Mencken's 1948 stroke. It appears in his Minority Report (1956), a collection of odds and ends from his private notebooks, as the second paragraph of item #267. Minority Report was originally published at New York by Alfred A. Knopf but is now kept in print by the Johns Hopkins University Press, part of something called the Buncombe Collection.]

Columbia to Chinatown walk, 20120122

For the first time since the spring I walked to Chinatown from home. In the past this has been my favorite form of exercise, and I think I have felt healthiest when doing it regularly. Although the number of calories I burn per hour isn’t comparable to what I can do on an elliptical machine, it is a longer course of exercise than I ever do on a machine and there is a strong meditative component to it. Above all, the “music of the city street” succors me like nothing else.

I got up at 7:45, enough time to leave at 8:00 and be on East Broadway by 10:30, after a leisurely walk along the river. East Broadway is far enough east that a little extra time has to be left beyond simply reaching Canal St. on the West Side. But I looked out the window at the frozen slush and couldn’t motivate myself to go out the door. A proper morning walk is easiest if you start immediately on rising, without thinking. I let the moment pass and decided to take the train at 9:30.

But at 8:20 I was already feeling regrets. On the principle that whatever I don’t feel like doing is precisely what I should do, I got my shoes on and was on the road at 8:31. Rather than follow the river, I took a different route, also slower than necessary, heading to the East Side through Central Park first. Normally I would follow Broadway, the most time-efficient path because Broadway cuts gently eastward at a diagonal through the grid, imposing its humanity on the bureaucratic structure. I was sure I’d be late. But to my great surprise I arrived at 10:32, essentially in perfect time. I admit I pushed myself to take longer and faster strides than usual because I didn’t want to leave my food-partner waiting, and so I ran for about three of the blocks. I also lost my willpower at one moment near the end and hailed a passing #15 bus. But the bus driver ignored me, and I found my own drive fully refreshed by the slight.

Discomforts of the walk to Chinatown from Columbia:

  • On the Broadway route it is stressful facing the “uncity” hordes in Times Square. This has gotten worse since the area was closed to traffic. I can deal with cars much better than with tourists — in the old days, my method was to walk in the street at the edge of the traffic, basically a safe and happy between-space for me. But now there are no cars and the best idea is to head east around the pedestrian-only area. I’m technically a pedestrian, but then again not exactly.
  • The river route brings you into conflict with bicyclists, while all the far West Side routes (10th Avenue and west) put you at the mercy of uncity drivers who think they are on a highway rather than in New York.
  • On the East Side, on weekends one encounters dog walkers who, though not uncity in the formal sense, seem to dwell in a subjective suburb all the same, unaware that their long leashes are a dangerous obstacle to people like me because their whole attention is on the sound in their headphones. On weekdays there are many commuters on the street — angrier with the world, it seems to me, on the East Side than on the West.

Two more rules of thumb for the New York subway

  • Getting a less crowded car. If the trains you are trying to take are persistently crowded, try riding some number of stops in the opposite direction and then switching back to the direction you want to go in. You may be able to get on before the crowds have accumulated. Schematically, this is like applying a function to a hard problem in order to make it easier to solve and then after it has been solved applying the function’s inverse.
  • A situation when you should always take a seat. If the train stops unexpectedly between stations for longer than a minute or two, grab any empty seat you can. You may be delayed longer than you planned for, and in such circumstances you may be glad to be able to sit down. You can always give it up to someone in greater need, anyway.

Earlier remarks on NYC transportation.

Two rules of thumb about transportation in New York

  • If you take a cab, always get a receipt. It may prove useful later if you find you have lost something or need to remember where you were at a certain time.
  • When there is a crowd on the subway platform, don’t try to be the first one into the car. Instead, get behind someone large and aggressive (aggressive is the most important quality), so you can follow them in without having to shove too many people, yourself.

Pípá yā 琵琶鴨 (frisbee duck)

One of the more striking Cantonese roast meats in Chinatown is the pípá yā 琵琶鴨 ‘lute-shaped duck’. The duck is cut open and roasted while splayed flat with a horseshoe-shaped metal frame. The splaying allows more moisture to evaporate and fat to drip out during roasting, so the meat is drier and the flavor more concentrated. Ordinary shāoyā 燒鴨 ‘roast duck’ has a quantity of dark liquid inside that is discarded when the duck is cut into pieces (zhǎn 斬), but the pípá yā does not, and that accounts for part of the difference. The roasting process itself is the same as for ordinary shāoyā; there are no other seasonings used, for instance. The metal frame remains in place until the duck is cut up. All the Cantonese roast fowl have skin that is basically soft, unlike the more familiar Peking duck, which is specially treated to burn off the fat and leave the skin crisp (or leathery, depending on your chef’s skill).

The name pípá yā has to do with the fact that the splayed-open duck is imagined to look like a Chinese lute — pípá 琵琶 (Japanese biwa, Korean bipa) — which has a round body. The duck’s neck is usually curved to one side, unlike the straight neck of an ordinary roast duck. As with many Chinese culinary metaphors, ‘lute’ is not so apt as it is appetizing — I mean, in its suggestion of palace life or scholarly seclusion. When I was a boy, my friends and I called these things “frisbee ducks”, which has no charm at all.

I bought one this morning from Sun Sai Gai 新世界 at 220 Canal, corner Baxter, one of Chinatown’s long-term institutions (though the management has changed a number of times in the 35 years I’ve been going there).

A new kind of noise in the subway

Waiting for subway trains used to be one of the surprisingly quiet pleasures of New York life. Not when a train is nearby, of course, but at other times. The sounds of the street are usually gone or at least made distant. In some stations you can hear trains in motion somewhere else. And there are also the various sounds that human beings make — which are much harder to hear on the street. I find subway platforms reasonably good for reading and proofreading my writing.

But since the new announcement system was installed, within the past couple of years, we have begun to be bombarded with the hyper-amplified human voice about once a minute. It’s a horror and I wonder if it was not set in place by one of the many MTA executives who don’t actually live in New York or take the subway. Some day, something must be done about those people — require them to commute by subway, for a start.

Trying to understand this as an intentional act, I wonder if it is not actually a secret strategy to drive away vagrants who would otherwise try to sleep in isolated places on the platforms.

September 11th sensations

I find myself tense in the lead-up to September 11th. I feel most of New York has been comfortably past obsession with the events themselves for some time but America is not yet, and they will never let us alone. Apparently there is now a special tourist memorial built at Ground Zero and the word is it will have an expensive admission fee. I’ll consult my thesaurus but I doubt there is a word to describe how that makes me feel. “Grateful for the tourist support but excluded from regular involvement” — on second thought, this is already a known feeling in New York. As to the way we were manipulated with terror “alerts” during the Bush-Cheney years, the less said the better.

I have never gotten comfortable with the name “9/11″, which seemed to dominate media coverage of the aftermath of the attacks. However, on the ground in New York in those days, “September 11th” was the main name I heard used; being without a TV I use it still.

I have been dismayed at the complications that overtook the rebuilding of the World Trade Center — I had expected that to be done very rapidly, as a show of stamina and drive.

City checkpoint chaos

Traffic chaos in NYC this afternoon. There is a terrorism alert, so checkpoints have been set up around the city and at the bridges and tunnels, and all trucks are being stopped and inspected. A cab between Columbia and E. 60th St. took 60 minutes instead of the usual 25. On return, no cabs at all were to be had and even Carmel Limo, after promising a car, called back to say the one they had dispatched couldn’t make it. In the end, I found an off-duty yellow cabbie who was about to go home but who agreed to take us “not for your sake but for your mother’s.” We saw people trying to get cabs on every single corner we passed. I feel grateful for the decency of both the driver and Carmel (for having bothered to let us know they couldn’t make it).

The subways seemed fine, but my mother is too old to take the trains any more.

Riverside Drive above about 97th St. was also slowed by barricades, no-parking signs, and what appears to be the beginning of a veteran-biker-fireman rally of some kind.

“The Highline” Park

Yesterday we took a couple of hours off for a visit to the “Highline”, a park, or something like a park, that opened a couple of years ago in Chelsea. It is built on the remnant of an elevated train platform that runs through some twenty or so city blocks on the lower West Side of New York.

It’s a pleasant walk, much quieter than the street or than Riverside Park South, and there are interesting industrial views to be had in various directions.

Why even 212 phone numbers calling in-area have to dial 212 first

This began on 1 February, 2003, after several years’ delay because of a legal appeal by the New York Public Service Commission and the Consumer Federation of America. The Federal Communications Commission had ruled that when a new area code was made to “overlay” an old one, calls made from numbers in both areas would have to use area codes, even when those calls were in-area. The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals found:

Even with New York’s advances in local telephone service competition …, concerns about maintaining competition remain. For instance, without 10-digit dialing, the dialing disparity between numbers in the old and new area codes remains. Second, … any implementation of any new area code … is initially confusing, not only to customers in the affected area, but also to those who call them from outside that area. (U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Docket No. 99-4205,
PEOPLE OF THE STATE v FCC, http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=search&case=/data2/circs/2nd/994205.html)

The court did not agree that

Without mandatory 10-digit dialing … numbers from the new area code are less valuable than numbers from the old area code, placing the carrier with more old numbers … at an advantage over new carriers, an inequitable result.

The New York Times has two important stories about this issue, at