Last week, I shared a lighter memory of Summer in the City here on the blog. I write this now on a windy yet steaming hot night in which all the windows are open in our apartment as another ice cream truck passes down our street, stopping near the public playground where youth never seem to sleep. We stay up later, my husband and I, and we are early to rise because of the heat, even if we reluctantly give in and turn on the air conditioner. My diet becomes “a variation in Popsicle” (yes, the novelty brand), and our freezer fills with Creamsicles, Scribblers, Yogurt Swirlz, and of course the original Orange, Cherry and Grape. (I’m eating a Firecracker as I type this.) We have dinner in the outside garden of Sripraphai, a Thai restaurant so good that diners come from all five boroughs (be sure to get the papaya salad, fried soft shell crab, panang curry, and a side of coconut rice—or two). This year, we’re also trying to venture out somewhere new to us in the city on the weekend with one condition: we turn off our phones and live in the moment. A month in, it’s working out pretty well, and I highly recommend it to you.
This week, I asked a few other poets and writers to share their own memories and ideas of summer in New York City. Check them out below, and feel free to share your own in the comment sections.
—Rosebud Ben-Oni
Summer in the city means boys in shorts and tank tops. It means much more visible. . . package, basket, pipe—the metaphors change, the length & girth remain the same, as does the voyeuristic jouissance. Summer in the city means brunch and cocktails and cruising. In parks and on promenades. The Ramble. The High Line. Summer in the city means Jones Beach and the LIRR to Sayville to catch the ferry to Fire Island Pines or Cherry Grove. Daytripping. Couch surfing. The Meat Rack. Daniel Nardicio underwear parties at the Ice Palace. Falling asleep drunk on the beach. Hair of the dog that bit you. T and G. All night long. And then some. And then some more. Summer is different from all other seasons in the city because it is the season when we sweat, when we are hungry, when we yearn, when we reveal what we have to offer, what we have on offer, what we have to GIVE. Only in summer can you plunge into the surf off the beach in Coney Island and feel that life is so full of possibility, you think you may BURST. Only in summer, when the lights go out, when the city goes dark, when you have to climb flights of stairs in the suffocating heat to get to your apartment or cook dinner in a kettle for a block full of hungry, thirsty, demoralized neighbors, can you know what it really means to be part of the fabric of New York, the fabric of life, of community, of looking out for your fellow man-woman-child-lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-gender-nonconforming-intersex-queer-questioning-straight neighbor, of the desperate need to love and be loved.
—Michael Broder
“Si te quieres divertir, con encanto y con primor
solo tienes que vivir, un verano en Nueva York” ~ El Gran Combo
As every year welcomes the hot weather, I am reminded that nothing compares to a Verano en Nueva York. After the school year ended in Venezuela, I’d take a plane from Caracas to New York to visit Papi. I was mesmerized by the number of cars and people all around going in different directions, at the skyscrapers which seemed as if they’d devour the city and all of us. For the next two months, I rode the 7 train, which was my favorite, my eyes popping at the sight of train cars and walls tagged with graffiti, a sight not familiar in Caracas. I’d help Papi with his Curramba kiosk in Flushing Meadows Park for the annual Colombian Festival, where he sold all the bocaditos from his native Barranquilla. I remember being first introduced to Shea Stadium where Papa bought my first Mets hat, I became a fan, and yes, “I still believe.” I remember celebrating my birthday at McDonald’s; my clothes soaking wet at the playground sprinklers of Forest Park; eating plums and cherries in the grass then rolling around to the bottom of the hill. I remember my first roller coaster ride at Coney Island’s Cyclone: arms up in the air and scream: ahhhhh! To be a child again…
—Wendy Angulo
I grew up in Woodhaven, South Queens. The J train cut through the neighborhood like a watercourse, Manhattan bound, and bent into Brooklyn beside Cypress Pool and a churchyard for the Union dead. We lived in a two family split-level—my father and mother, two brothers, and me—dwarfed by a row of tenements, a half block off Jamaica Avenue. We shared the house with the Osonitches, a Polish-German family who had emigrated from Warsaw by way of Brazil. My father worked in Manhattan on Saint James Place; my mother worked in Bushwick. You could hear the train’s stutter in every room of the house.
I still live near an el. From June to September the sunlight on the avenue seems speckled by design, the patterned shade like the punctured screen of a confessional. I love summer in New York. I remember Augusts as a teenager, taking the J home from hardcore shows at ABC No Rio: Yuppicide. Wheelchair. Bands with names in bubble letters. I loved to sit in the air-conditioned cars of an el, looking out onto the tarred roofs of walk-ups along the avenue, at the cupola of Frankin K. Lane, satellite dishes like signposts across Richmond Hill. Riding the el in the summer is like watching an adaptation of Bashō’s wistful poem, whose speaker longs for Kyoto even in Kyoto.
—Ryan Black
Summer in Manhattan changed for me once I found a place to swim. I like my pools heated—I mean, really heated. I like swimming in a pool when it feels like paddling around in embryonic fluid.
No one is going to heat a pool like that in this town, I thought. I had been sticking my toes in pools for years: parties, lessons, hotels, gyms. It wasn’t happening.
Then, last winter, I was introduced to the Westside Y. I toured the medieval-ish complex on West 63rd, following a guide through the locker room and then a couple of dungeon-y hallways, past a large pool of lap-swimmers, until we finally reached a brightly lit, blue, white and yellow tiled space that featured an elaborate mosaic of Neptune: the small, heated pool.
I stuck my toe in. And then I joined the Y.
While the large pool has lanes and is for lap swimmers only, the small pool has a roped-off shallow end for small children and their parents and a deeper end for everyone else. This deeper end often holds lap swimmers as well as doggie paddlers, toy-divers, and single kids in private swimming lessons. It’s a lot of things I love: vibrant, a little shabby, democratic, and welcoming to all. After I swim, I spin my suit dry in the locker room, and then walk down Central Park west to Columbus Circle, where there is invariably an ice cream truck parked. I eat my cone with rainbow sprinkles while sitting on the concrete wedge over the 59th street station. The chlorine on my skin smells like Chanel.
—Amy Fusselman