‘Hunker Explores New York’s York’s Subway’ – NY Times 9-13-1914
‘Huneker Explores New York’s Subway’ – NY Times 9-13-1914
Posted here (see above):
“Huneker Nervously Explores New York’s Subway”
By James Huneker
The New York Times Magazine
September 13, 1914
James Huneker (1857-1921) was an literary, theater, and arts critic for the New York Sun.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 2023
L train, 11:35 a.m., April 18, 2023
Non-New Yorkers may think it is something that only people who have to take it endure … that it is unpleasant to take the subway.
Mostly I find it’s the opposite.
I thought about this while taking the L train from Brooklyn to Manhattan yesterday.
The subways are often not that crowded. I tend to be in a thoughtful mood (all of this is true of the buses, as well); enjoy the people, who by a large majority are polite and usually pleasing in appearance.
There are always a lot of young people, by which I mean mostly 20s and 30s. A large number of them are reading their cell phones or engaged in lively conversations. Some are reading books in which they usually seem engrossed.
I often catch up on the news on my phone or on Facebook posts.
And, sometimes I am lost in thought. The subway is peaceful enough to permit this.
I don’t have to worry going home if I have had a couple of beers, and I don’t have to deal with driving.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 19, 2023
I love the place, and I am not alone. It has been a refuge and a place for reading and learning since its founding over a hundred years ago.
Everyone is welcome.
The main library opened in 1911.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2023
photographs by Roger W. Smith
I feel the ship’s motion under me, I feel the Atlantic breezes fanning me,
— Walt Whitman, “A Song of Joys”
I myself felt the delicious cool breezes blowing on me as I crossed and recrossed the harbor on the Staten Island Ferry last evening.
A great end to a splendid day.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 25, 2023
I thought of this post today when I met a homeless woman in a subway station.
It seemed applicable to NYC as one experiences it,
It’s on my rogersgleanings.com site:
“in minute particulars”
— Roger W. Smith
March 14, 2023
It was Sunday afternoon, March 5, and I was at my favorite pub, on Seventh Avenue, engrossed in a weighty book of literary criticism.
Time to leave, I thought. I called my wife and told her, I’m leaving the bar, but I don’t want to go home. I think I will go downtown and take the ferry.
Good idea, she said, My wife is an affirmative person.
I just made the 5 p.m. ferry to Staten Island, and took the ferry going back. I took the photos shown below.
It was a perfect sky on a late winter day.
— Roger W. Smith
Sea-cabbage; salt hay; sea-rushes; ooze–sea-ooze; gluten–sea-gluten; sea-scum; spawn; surf; beach; salt-perfume; mud; sound of walking barefoot ankle in the edge of the water by the sea. — Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Volume IV: Notes, edited by Edward F. Grier (New York University Press 1984), pg. 1309
photographs of Midland Beach, Staten Island, by Roger W. Smith
— posted by Roger W. Smith
February 2023
Walt Whitman, ‘Brooklyn Parks’
Posted here (Word document above):
Walt Whitman. “BROOKLYN PARKS”
Brooklyn Daily Times, April 17, 1858
What intrigues me is Whitman’s mention of “a Park on the heights, over Montague ferry!,” whereby he refers to the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, from which there is a splendid view of Manhattan.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
January 2023
Brooklyn Heights; photo by Roger W. Smith
Brooklyn Heights; photo by Roger W. Smith
Walt Whitman, ‘Philosophy of Ferries’
Posted here (Word document above):
Walt Whitman “Philosophy of Ferries,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 11, 1947
IN The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman; Much of Which Has Been But Recently Discovered, with Various Early Manuscripts; Now First Published; Collected and Edited by Emory Holloway, Volume One, pp. 168-171 (Gloucester, Mass. Peter Smith, 1972)
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Things haven’t changed much since Whitman’s day.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
January 2023
photo by Roger W. Smith
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See also my post
the ferry
Posted here (Word document above):
Wat Whitman, “BROADWAY”
Life Illustrated, August 9, 1856
an unsigned article attributed to Whitman, reprinted in
New York Dissected By Walt Whitman: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of LEAVES OF GRASS; Introduction and Notes by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Inc. 1936), pp. 119-124
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Whitman’s experiences and impressions in his pre-Civil War years are similar to my own in Manhattan jaunts. (I also love to take the ferry.) As noted by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari:
When Moncure D. Conway, at Emerson’s suggestion, called upon Whitman a month or so after the appearance of Leaves of Grass, in 1855, he took a walk with him through the city. “Nothing could surpass,” he says, “the blending of insouciance with active observation in his manner as we strolled along the streets”. … Whitman had been walking the streets, riding the omnibuses and crossing the ferries for many years. His memory was stored with so many such impressions that one of his early manuscripts describes his mind as a picture gallery. Perhaps it was from a desire to reconcile the contradictions in these multiform and inharmonious impressions that the poet sought escape in mystical rhapsody. The peculiar quality of Whitman’s elevated poetic mood, however, is due to the fact that instead of withdrawing his mind ascetically from experience, he sought rather to use definite concrete experiences to climb to a summit of vision which would embrace them all.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
January 2022
Roger Smith's New York 