I didn’t move to New York City until 1985, after the Automats were gone, and I wish I could’ve seen them. Here’s a hilarious movie clip with an Automat scene from “Easy Living” with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland (1937), a kind of Depression-era anarchic fantasy where all the little food doors swing open to hungry New Yorkers.
Assuming the above clip made you laugh, I recommend the whole film, linked to here in a good print via youtube.
As summer has taken hold in NYC, I’ve been going out into Riverside Park more regularly, as I’ve done for years. I ride my bike, and also walk. To enjoy my outings, and make good use of my time by reading and editing—what can be called “working recreation”—I’ve been looking to buy one of those lightweight low-slung camp chairs I see other folks have. I’m thinking of it more this summer, because of coronavirus, and the fact that having a portable seat I can clean and sanitize myself, that doesn’t leave me dependent on finding a suitable park bench, or a patch of dry grass, is a good thing. I think I may have found just what I want, the ALPS Mountaineering Rendezvous Folding Camp Chair, which weighs only about seven pounds, and breaks down in to a satchel you can sling over the shoulder. Comes in khaki and rust, and not a bad price.
On a recent bike ride I happened upon Remembrance Rock on the upper Manhattan campus of City College, commemorating students who died in American wars. A lugubrious history respectfully memorialized in public space. A sadly fitting homage, to bring soil from the places where service members died to this spot on the island New Yorkers call home, and mingle it with soil from historic places in the city. A kind of time capsule committed to the ground in 1959, , among the things I’d never known about my own city.
The full text of the Whitmanesque message can be read easily by clicking here:
#RemembranceRock