THE NEW YORK MOON

Nau Glandia

In the little neighborhood called Nau Glandia, people are a bit mixed up. After so many generations of immigrants ending up in their little neighborhood, ethnicity has become liquid, amorphous, confusing. One gentleman I came across said he was 1% Icelandic, 32% Haitian, 14.5% Greek, 17.5% Spanish-American, and 35% Egyptian. “How,” I asked, “is that possible?” He shrugged, puffing away on a water pipe.

As I wandered a bit, looking for a bite to eat, I observed things to be even stranger than they first seemed. Christian churches had muezzins, with little boys with jet-black pony tails ululating passages from the New Testament on the hour. Mosques, by contrast, were covered in crosses and Stars of David. In outdoor cafes, people were having high tea with cheeseburgers, smoking clove cigarettes. (One word of advice: Do not expose the soles of your feet to the person sitting across from you. That was a mistake I had to spend a good 15 minutes explaining my way out of.) There were perfume shops staffed by half-Indian, half Swedes, with elaborate aromas that you can’t quite place. Whiffs of the spices of the sub-continent twirl with scents of mossy cliffs of Scandinavia. A line of women filed past me, each wearing elaborate burkas that went as far as the thigh — the result, let me tell you, was alluring. I stumbled into an alley where I was shown silver broaches with African designs by men with translucent skin and mohawks. Little steaming cups of espresso mixed with snake blood were offered in little cafes in dugout canoes floating in a canal behind a row of wood-paneled homes. And then there was an old lady, maybe 70 or so, sitting on her porch in a rocking chair in the shade of a big American flag.

Nick Calvero

West End

You are probably better off not even looking for what they call West End. It’s not like London and musicals and a jolly time at the theater. This West End is a dusty corridor with pieces of paper blowing around and loud bangs in the night. It has the unfortunate predicament of being between police precincts, so there is no law, except a kind of code: Always tip your hat, avoid discussion of religion at the dinner table, don’t drink water straight from the tap. An outsider is noticed instantly. The residents go to work like everyone else, riding the subways into Manhattan, taking elevators, sitting at little desks and cubicles, but at night, they have no choice: They have to go home. They tread carefully as they round the corner into their windy little neighborhood because life is a little dangerous in the West End. There is a saloon, Tom’s, and there is a regular cover band with a banjo player, The June Bugs. They only plays songs from before the 1960s and eye their audience members a little warily. There is drinking and there are old grudges — you can’t be too careful. When someone forgets the time and it gets late, they tend to leave out the back entrance and scurry through alleyways to get home. When they get inside, they double-bolt the door and take a deep breath. Surveillance cameras seem to miss the streets on their sweep, but if they did, they’d capture dark men pacing the street, little eddies of dust obscuring their faces, silver pistols.

Nick Calvero

Mill Heights

At first glance, one might confuse Mill Heights for a single high-rise, which towers into the stratospheric haze. Yet, upon closer inspection, observers are astonished to find that each level varies grotesquely in its architecture, construction, and function. A neoclassical library sits atop a stucco multiplex, which rests on a Chinese restaurant, which is known to farm Tilapia in its back room. Mill Heights owes its peculiar structure to a preservationist zoning ordinance established long ago: All new development must occur below existing structures. Thus, like a date palm, it pushes up in segments. Traveling up the staircases that join the tiers, visitors have the distinct sense of moving backwards in time. At floor 12, there is a Starbucks; at 100, a storefront evangelical church; at 408, a brick apartment building; floors 516 through 506 bracket a small development of nearly identical Victorian houses with unruly hedges surrounding the perimeter; at 751, an inexplicable segment of subway tunnel hangs, dislodged many years ago from its underground moorings; at 988, there is a mossy cemetery for Irishmen; On 1264, a vacant bootlegger’s den stacked with yellowed, Portuguese newspapers. One finds the remnants of waves of people spreading out, populating, and then vanishing almost as suddenly, leaving only the dusty husks of their communal institutions teetering in the high-altitude crosswinds. Indeed, a total history of the neighborhood lies preserved to those oxygen-tanked climbers who probe the upper atmosphere, though not a single person I’ve spoken to has claimed to have reached the top. As such, it is not known where the name “Mill Heights” originates, though these amateur historians suspect that it refers to the function of the first building that caps the heap. Still, others believe that the moniker is of recent coinage — an invention of real estate agents trying to sell the coveted first floor for top dollar.

Max Populous

The Other Airport

The other airport lies just outside the city, in a former patch of Nassau County hardwood forest overlooking a halfhearted golf course. It was built for all those not quite sold on the idea of America. As such, it is slightly closer than the other two airports to all the non-American places that people generally come to New York from. In the beginning, people found it extremely inconvenient, but before long they began to settle in concentric nation-neighborhoods around the terminal which, unlike the more assimilated ghettos within the city limits, remained on the same time zones as their native countries. Today, new arrivals can take a left out of the British Airways terminal, weave through a parking lot, make their way down a grassy slope and find themselves squarely within GMT. No matter that it’s still lunchtime in Manhattan; at this place it’s time for an after-work pint. A short walk away, a banker from Beijing is dressing for work as his Long Island neighbors settle into the sofa for an evening of primetime. Emigrés from Tel Aviv, Damascus and Dar es Salaam find themselves perfectly in sync. The Ethiopians, as in Africa, continue to operate on a mysterious schedule that no one can guess. Visitors drive out from the city to sample each neighborhood’s time the way other kinds of connoisseurs scour the outer boroughs for the most authentic ethnic food. Night-shift workers congregate in Japanese bars as the sun rises. College students skip afternoon classes to get a taste of after-hour seediness as the Thai cabaret. And every civilized person getting in at noon has high tea for brunch in Little England before deciding whether it’s really worth passing through jet lag’s three-day haze just to join the jerky rhythm of North America.

Keach Hagey

Voidville

On one hand, Voidville is unmissable. On the other, it’s imperceptible.

To outsiders, it appears as a serrated, black wasteland, with two towers jutting out of the middle. To the initiated, it sparkles with unimaginable luminance. Luxurious plazas overflow with greenery, and open onto small shops that overlook the water. A sophisticated light-encryption field surrounds Voidville, and those fortunate enough to live there are required to purchase optical implants to unscramble it. The luckiest among them live in the New Black Towers: twin luxury apartment buildings with unparalleled views of Manhattan and Brooklyn. It is, in this way, at once the most hideous and the most beautiful facet of the borough. Little more can be verified first hand; few residents wish to divulge their identity, for fear that they will be targeted for eye robbery. Thus, more dubious sources must suffice. Take, for instance, the store-front psychic on the periphery who told me that its borders were edging gradually outward, swallowing more of its surroundings every year.

Max Populous

Moore’s Island

I heard of this place from a Staten Island pastor who was drinking late at a waterfront bar. The old man was hiccuping, and begging for one more drink. He’d do anything for another drink. The bartender said: Go home Freddy. You’ve got a wife, you’re drunk. He just laughed and said out loud, I’ll tell ya all a secret for another drink. There’s a place you’ve never been, and I know where it is.

That got my attention, traveler as I am, so I slid down the bar and bought him a whiskey. Tell me about this place, old timer.

He took a long drink, and said: It’s no more than a mile from here, an island. The only way to find it is to follow an old electrical wire. It’s rusty and dips like this. You take a boat, see. They don’t like it if you come with a motor, so you have to get one of those row boats from the marina. It takes a lot out of you to row a boat, especially an old man like me. They needed a preacher, so I went with the little island’s mayor. They have their own mayor, ha, and they have this code to get in. A flashlight, you turn it on for three short ones in a row, then two long ones. They call the place Moore’s Island.

Another drink, would you mind? Sure, I said.

They have a mayor, did I tell you that? It’s a dark place. They only have lights in the back of their houses. A very organized bunch, quiet, especially with newcomers. They wanted to hear a sermon, said they didn’t have an official church. The whole place had maybe ten houses. They wore suits, and chef uniforms, and one guy even had a bike messenger bag. Said they liked the quiet, and looking at the lights in the buildings from afar. They were a very social kind of group, if you get my meaning. They met in a little place behind the houses, where they had a stream with salt water and some grass, and lawn chairs. Sometimes you can see it from here, a tiny orange glow from their campfire, just a little fleck of orange, a kind of ugly grin.

I stood up on a bit of a stump, and I told them the usual things, you know: don’t covet your wife and stay away from drink. They were a quiet bunch, and looked a little uneasy with me there, but the mayor, he gave them this confident kind of look. And afterwards, he took me back in the boat and rowed us back quietly. When we got close, he squeezed my hand very hard, like this, and he leaned closed to me, and said, never. mention. this. place.

Nick Calvero

Akwesasne Pews

Akwesasne men built our skyscrapers. They have a nerve unlike ordinary men. The black-and-white pictures you see sometimes of white guys with lunch boxes hundreds of feet from the ground? Those were actors; that steel was laid by Akwesasne men, who come from near the Canadian border. They are a nomadic people, following the work from city to city. But New York has its own kind of colony, what with all the work here and buildings rising ever higher. Their nerve is in high demand. The Akwesasne men lived on a few streets in South Brooklyn, and if you go there now, you can find their sons and grandsons. On the walls are pictures of the brave Akwesasne men who came before them, who had bad teeth and drank hard at night as they pined for their women and the taste of wall-eyed perch fished from ice holes in the St. Lawrence River.

Nick Calvero

This Place Doesn’t Have a Name

I’m not even sure if this place exists. I know it does, theoretically, but I’ve never seen it. It is an accident, a freak of zoning laws and the ambitions of a developer who “just wanted to get the building done.” See, the community board ruled that his tower could have no windows that looked out onto the inner courtyard. The thinking was that inner courtyards are depressing and lead to suicidal thoughts. That was the condition if he wanted to build 50 stories. His architect’s plans called for a courtyard, but he was in a hurry, so he agreed and built his tower with a vast, empty vein in the middle. There is no doorway or windows to this place. A large fence on the roof prevents anyone from peering over the edge, and my attempts at zooming in with Google Maps were unsuccessful. I’ve never seen it, and neither have the little aging Upper West Side residents that live next to it. It could be a giant bowl of water, or the place pigeons go at night. No one is quite sure it’s there at all.

Nick Calvero

The Merchant’s Quarter

If you look close at the cobblestoned streets in this neighborhood next to the Financial District, you might notice the opalescent tinge of the rocks. This was the exclusive neighborhood for an oligopoly of merchants in the late 17th century. Entrance was barred by wrought-iron fences. New York police hired on the sly worked as sentries, keeping the streets empty and pristine.

It’s now inhabited by Wall Street-types living in landmarked buildings with modern elevators and exposed brick fireplaces in studio apartments and one bedrooms. But if you take a deep breath at night, you might hear the cackling in the alley ways. Over meals of guinea fowl and oysters, the neighborhood’s founders colluded in plots to assassinate their competitors. Upstarts were dealt with swiftly: A dagger to the heart and stowed in a dark basement. At weekly gatherings they would carve the flesh from the bodies, feeding it to the wild cats along the docks. They’d grind the bones to dust and mix in a portion of crushed pearl. Hired workers made bricks with the mixture and laid them down until more than six square blocks were covered. The old merchants, like their descendants, smiled as they made their way to the markets.

Nick Calvero

The Edge

And miles away from the epicenter of Manhattan, halfway across the globe, is New York’s edge. I came across it in a neighborhood with row upon row of suburban homes in the glaring desert sun. The temperature must have been 120 degrees. Two young boys wearing kaffiyehs took me on a tour. We walked for what seemed like miles, passing manicured lawns, street lights, glistening manoles, half-moons above doorways. One of the boys spit; it evaporated on contact with the asphalt. I could see the beginning of the desert, yawning across the horizon with each step closer. There were bulldozers, construction workers, a pair of small cranes. They were laying down the foundation for another row of houses. “When we first moved to the block,” one of the boys said, “we only had to walk a few houses to get to here. Now, it takes an hour. Where will it be in a year?” We stepped off the pavement onto the hot sand, over the edge.

Nick Calvero