Last Saturday
May. 14th, 2010 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedMy great-aunt Susan and I went to Brooklyn to see my cousin Sam's art exhibit.
Susan was unusually timid when she asked whether I wanted to go - lots of "perhaps"es in the email -- and she also asked my mother, first, if I'd be interested. My mental conception of my great-aunt is of this very strong-willed person who just assumes the cooperation of others, particularly of younger family members. But recently she's felt less physically able and this has shaken her confidence somewhat, I guess. She wanted me to come along as an escort because Brooklyn is "too far". I like Susan so I said yes right away.
I thought "too far" was a joke, but it did turn out to be pretty difficult to get to the exhibit. ^^; First of all, Susan had written down the directions, but because she never takes the subway she had written them down as "get off the J train at this street," and not "get off the J train at this stop." Secondly, the J train doesn't even run on Saturdays.
So we took the 4 instead, thinking we'd go to the stop where the J and 4 split and then take a cab the rest of the way. However, cabs are much scarcer in Brooklyn. No one was stopping to pick us up.
"We'll ask for directions!" Susan said. Privately I was skeptical, because Brooklyn is geographically huge. I suggested that we ask a bus driver. This worked out well: all the drivers knew all the routes, and we were able to take two buses to the neighborhood of the exhibit.
After that everything went smoothly, except for the part where the bus passed our cross street without stopping and was headed at a very steep diagonal to our street. When all the hipsters got off the bus, I insisted that we get off, too. From there we walked back about five or six blocks to the exhibit.
On the way home, we called a cab.
To make a long story short, we finally arrived at the exhibit, I said hi to Sam, and Susan was vocally skeptical of the artistic merits of his installation piece, which was going to be a stack of cardboard with paper whorls "buried" in it, like sediment layers, until the stack fell over, and then it became a metaphor for the artistic process. XD;;;
Trip highlight: every time we passed a Starbucks or a Macy's, Susan would exclaim: It's been Manhattanized! Brooklyn has been Manhattanized! To which I would say, but Susan, Brooklyn is a part of America...
When I told R this story, she said that the best thing about living in Brooklyn or Queens is that it frees you to consider all the events, restaurants, and neighbourhoods located OUTSIDE of Manhattan. Manhattanites have a very locked-in mindset, she says.
Susan was unusually timid when she asked whether I wanted to go - lots of "perhaps"es in the email -- and she also asked my mother, first, if I'd be interested. My mental conception of my great-aunt is of this very strong-willed person who just assumes the cooperation of others, particularly of younger family members. But recently she's felt less physically able and this has shaken her confidence somewhat, I guess. She wanted me to come along as an escort because Brooklyn is "too far". I like Susan so I said yes right away.
I thought "too far" was a joke, but it did turn out to be pretty difficult to get to the exhibit. ^^; First of all, Susan had written down the directions, but because she never takes the subway she had written them down as "get off the J train at this street," and not "get off the J train at this stop." Secondly, the J train doesn't even run on Saturdays.
So we took the 4 instead, thinking we'd go to the stop where the J and 4 split and then take a cab the rest of the way. However, cabs are much scarcer in Brooklyn. No one was stopping to pick us up.
"We'll ask for directions!" Susan said. Privately I was skeptical, because Brooklyn is geographically huge. I suggested that we ask a bus driver. This worked out well: all the drivers knew all the routes, and we were able to take two buses to the neighborhood of the exhibit.
After that everything went smoothly, except for the part where the bus passed our cross street without stopping and was headed at a very steep diagonal to our street. When all the hipsters got off the bus, I insisted that we get off, too. From there we walked back about five or six blocks to the exhibit.
On the way home, we called a cab.
To make a long story short, we finally arrived at the exhibit, I said hi to Sam, and Susan was vocally skeptical of the artistic merits of his installation piece, which was going to be a stack of cardboard with paper whorls "buried" in it, like sediment layers, until the stack fell over, and then it became a metaphor for the artistic process. XD;;;
Trip highlight: every time we passed a Starbucks or a Macy's, Susan would exclaim: It's been Manhattanized! Brooklyn has been Manhattanized! To which I would say, but Susan, Brooklyn is a part of America...
When I told R this story, she said that the best thing about living in Brooklyn or Queens is that it frees you to consider all the events, restaurants, and neighbourhoods located OUTSIDE of Manhattan. Manhattanites have a very locked-in mindset, she says.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-14 07:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-14 08:04 pm (UTC)The people R knows who live in Manhattan tend to be East Asians in finance.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-14 09:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-14 09:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-16 06:05 am (UTC)(Sure they do: they have a global view of finance. And in the rarefied Wall Street reaches foreign and American are essentially the same ppl united in class and capitalism.
Also: if you move to a city for a job or course of study that keeps you extremely busy, you're quite likely to go a year or so without leaving a ten-block radius of your center of operations. Saw it happen to a lot of MBAs who took up apartments in the McGill student ghetto.)
actually
Date: 2010-05-17 04:59 pm (UTC)I think people in cities just don't tend to think outside their city demarcations, and for a long time, anything outside of Manhattan was not *really* part of New York City, and that impression has stuck despite any urban development in the past 20 years. That tends to be the case even if you're a foreign national and have traveled a lot - a global view doesn't necessarily equate to a broad local view.
Of the Finance professionals I know, most of them are kind of out of touch with reality, especially those that haven't looked for a job in the past 2 years. They just work their 14 hour days and not much of anything else (echoing Petronia).
repost
Date: 2010-05-14 08:09 pm (UTC)The other thing R said was, how long has it been since your aunt has been to Brooklyn?
(Decades, probably...)