Matthew Gallaway

The Master, and Our Regret that Henry James Was Not Given His Due For Being the Hot Gay Bear that He Was

There is something oddly unsatisfying about The Master, Colm Toibin's 2004 treatment of the life of Henry James. Odd because we almost always love Toibin's prose, which is elegant but unpretentious, and -- unlike so much contemporary fiction -- never shifts tenses or otherwise calls attention to itself in a distracting or superfluous manner. Occasionally we were perturbed by the occasional Hallmark moment -- such as when Toibin writes that James "would treasure hearing of their lives and activities" (italics ours) -- but these were few and far between, and we found ourselves much more frequently underlining passages that pleased us; Toibin himself is a master of capturing the regret and nostalgia that comes with any serious introspection, and relays this in a subdued but beautiful tone that feels entirely in keeping with James. Other things we loved about the novel include the structure, which proceeds chronologically through a five-year period of the author's life -- at which point he is already in his fifties -- but fills it out with memories of his youth, and the way Toibin effortlessly relays events in James' life that had the most impact on his fiction, including some of our favorite novellas -- The Aspern Papers and The Beast in the Jungle come to mind -- as well as his most popular novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of The Dove. We thus emerge from the novel with a much better appreciation of at least some of the people who mattered to James, including his older brother William (the philosopher), his cousin Milly Temple (who died of cancer in her twenties), his precocious and bitter sister Alice (whom Toibin more than insinuates was gay, and who also died young), and a handful of high-society types with whom he associated in London and abroad, on the continent. Toibin's overarching theme, however, is that James' life was marked by an anxious desire to indulge in life -- even as he remembers it -- and what we are told in every instance is an unwillingness to do so; thus we are presented with a man whose longings never once cross over the carefully constructed walls of restraint he builds around every aspect of his life, except for -- obviously -- his fiction, into which he pours everything. It is this thesis that strikes us as problematic, because it just doesn't seem plausible that a man of James' wit, insight and -- frankly -- experience could have made it through his long life with no more than a single night in the arms of another man (in this case Oliver Wendell Holmes, when as teenagers they shared a bedroom one night in New Hampshire on their way to visit Milly Temple). Yet this is all that Toibin gives us; a few times he describes James' platonic interactions with similarly inclined men with whom he shares an attraction -- there is a servant and a young sculptor (Hendrik Anderson) who even visits James in his country house in Rye -- but with whom (Toibin is careful to point out) nothing physical ever happens, so that we as readers practically feel our own eyes brimming with the same tears of frustration as we are told that Henry lies in bed listening to the movements of his guest or servant one room over. The problem with this treatment, of course, is that it seems less rooted in any kind of truth than a contemporary pressure to "downplay" the homoeroticism -- and the real-life events that inspired it -- that courses through so much James' work. This is a shame because we feel that Toibin's sensitivity as a writer (and a gay man) would have done great justice to this facet of Jame's life, and might have made other episodes of the book feel less strained, such as the stilted description of James' friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson and her resulting death (to wit: it seems highly dubious to us that she killed herself (as Toibin implies) as a result of an unrequited love for James -- whose interest in men was hardly a secret -- than her depressive, artistic nature). So we are left with the sense that Toibin wrote this book for an audience that did not include many gay men, which may have been commercially pragmatic -- though we have our doubts -- but nevertheless impairs the integrity of the book. Even the cover of our paperback edition somewhat bizarrely features not an image of James (or any other character in the book) but one of his fictional heroines (presumably Milly Theale) staring out over the Grand Canal in Venice. (Seriously, wtf?) By contrast, when we see photographs of James taken during the era in which the book is set, we are not confronted with an asexual dandy but rather a man with an intensely thoughtful and -- yes -- virile expression, who in modern terms more than sets off our "gaydar"; in short, a "hot bear." (Not that we're advocating use of the term in a piece of period fiction, but merely making a point that he exudes far more than the pinched asexuality Toibin gives us.) Nor along the same lines can we believe that his relationship with Hendrik Anderson (and many others) did not extend beyond a yearning from one bedroom over. These were men, after all, who had fled the social puritanism of Boston for London, Paris and Rome; and if James was not as "flagrant" as say, Oscar Wilde, it cannot be denied that they traveled in the same (gay) circles. In the history of civilization, has there ever been such a circle whose members did not have a deep (and first-hand) appreciation for the physical dimensions of what gave them their outsider status, regardless of how they talked about it publicly? (We suspect not.) Rather than describe his characters in the code of James' era -- which is more or less to pretend that such things don't exist -- we wish that Toibin (as he did with every other aspect of James' life) would have given us a greater window into the truth. Here are some photographs. You decide.

Henry James in 1890 at the age of 47. Asexual or hot gay bear?

Henry James on the beach in 1897 at the age of 54. Asexual or hot gay bear?

Henry James in 1907 at the age of 64, with "young friend" Hendrik Anderson. Asexual or hot gay bear? 

On the Exceedingly Beautiful Ruins of Washington Heights: January 30, 2008

In which The Gay Recluse documents the exceedingly beautiful ruins of Washington Heights. Location: Audubon Terrace Address: Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets Remarks: Of all the exceedingly beautiful ruins in Washington Heights, perhaps none is more heartbreaking than Audubon Terrace. Not quite dead, it is like a great whale stranded on a beach; as much as we admire its sheer size and power, we are incapable of helping, and so must observe in an atmosphere shrouded in doom.

The south facade of Audubon Terrace.

Founded by Archer Milton Huntington in 1904, the site is an improbably grand Beaux Arts complex that originally housed The Hispanic Society, The Museum of the American Indian, The American Numismatic Society, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Geographical Society.

We are always alone here, except for the statues.

But today -- as we see on a pathetic sign near the entrance, on which the letters have been painted over like a perverse tombstone -- only two of the original tenants remain (The Hispanic Society and the American Academy of Arts and Letters); the others, apparently, could not tolerate the idea of carrying out their respective missions in a neighborhood marked by crime, poverty and immigrants, whose established history of collective ambivalence to the site is tragic but in many ways understandable. (As recently as 2006, it was reported in The Times that even the Hispanic Society would be moving downtown to escape Washington Heights.)

Welcome to the ruins.

Although a new tenant -- Boricua College -- has repaired some of the brickwork near the entrance, the plaza as a whole reeks of an institutionalized neglect we generally associate with the cities of Eastern Europe that languished for so long under Soviet bureaucracy. It is of course a supreme irony that one of the most magnificent repositories of Hispanic art and literature lies largely abandoned in the middle of a Dominican neighborhood; what seems most unforgivable is that the respective factions (neighborhood leaders, city officials, representatives of institutions) have not succeeded in collaborating to preserve these last members of a species so obviously on the verge of extinction.

Another sign: the missing word is "glows."

We climb the stairs toward the entrance of The Hispanic Society, and feel a certain dread at the thought of ever having to say goodbye. And to those incapable of expressing sympathy for us and the neighborhood at large -- and yes, we have even encountered disdain, as if to say that Washington Heights doesn't deserve such a treasure -- we have a simple message: fuck you and your soulless downtown neighborhoods that reek of money and privilege! Why don't you come uptown for a change to see art that's literally struggling for life? Why don't you walk across the crumbling bricks and cracking limestone facades of Audubon Terrace and tell us why you're so much better equipped to appreciate this beauty than we are?

Still waiting for the tech boom.

Why don't you stare into the eyes of El Cid (or better yet, Don Quixote) and tell him that he doesn't belong in such a poverty-stricken wasteland?

El Cid (1942), by Anna Hyatt Huntington.

But the anger passes and we are left alone on the plaza, where we walk among the warriors, who look past us with dull, metallic eyes. Though uniformly colossal, they too seem less anxious to fight than drained and weary, resigned to whatever fate may bring.

"Oh, please don't drop me home..." 

Gay Sex in the Seventies

First, it's a great title for a documentary; just to say Gay Sex in the Seventies makes us a little more forgiving than is perhaps our natural tendency. Plus you get to see some great shots of vintage Big Apple; the west-side piers, the notorious truck bays across the highway, the Upper West Side when it still had a soul gay bars, and of course the legendary bath houses and discos that have since been relegated to history. This alone makes the film -- released in 2005 -- worth seeing. Still, it is about (male) gay sex, and soon we are informed -- and have no reason to disbelieve -- that there was a LOT of it happening in the 1970s at these venues (and pretty much everywhere else in the city), and all of it enhanced by a LOT of drugs. The narrative is thus established: the 1970s = sex + drugs; hardly news, but we are curious to see what the rest of the film might have to say about this. Unfortunately, the answer is less than nothing. The bulk of it consists of interviews of five or six veterans (survivors) of the scene whose comments -- thanks in large part to the filmmakers -- quickly become a collective reinforcement of the above calculation, but with the added component of the looming AIDS epidemic, which of course has been the pink elephant in the room. But once it is addressed, we are given a somewhat modified though equally familiar (and disheartening) narrative: the 1970s = too much gay sex + too many drugs, ergo AIDS. This is the real tragedy of the film, because it makes it seem as if AIDS really was delivered as a moral judgment from the hand of some divine power who had seen enough. How we wish that the filmmakers would have fought this impulse, which caters to the most homophobic and degrading elements of our society! Rather than shrugging their creative shoulders, as if to say "well, we had it coming," why not point out that the rest of the country was also on a sexual, drug-addicted rampage, and (to the extent we can talk of a collective) wasn't rewarded with a lethal epidemic? Or why not talk about lesbians, whose relative immunity to AIDS so effectively trumps the morality card? Is there any reason to think they too weren't having loads of free love in the 1970s? (And we're willing to bet that there are still one or two around that would have been happy to talk about it.) As it is, we are left with the sense that every single gay man who died of AIDS was the recipient of a collective punishment for a collective crime. This is a disservice, for it perpetuates a myth that helps to fuel so much of the hatred we feel from the Fox-News wing of the country; on the other hand, it exposes the danger of unthinking adherence to any form of "community," which no matter how politically expedient can destroy the individuality of those whose stories we still desperately want to hear.

The Rainmaker

As we watch the first few minutes of The Rainmaker (some fifty years after its release, in 1956), we are impatient and judgmental; the set is generic Hollywood Western, while the men in the family -- a father and his two sons -- come off as caricatures (stern older brother, mischievous younger, wise dad). Even Katherine Hepburn (the sister -- Lizzie -- on the verge of becoming an old maid) seems at once too book-smart and too docile to be believed. The movie feels dated and two-dimensional, and even the Technicolor blue of the open sky seems less panoramic than garish; it makes us want to turn away, as if we were embarrassed by such an earnest, overreaching display. But just as we are about to check the time, we become intrigued by Burt Lancaster; in the early scenes, he too was unimpressive, merely a con artist somewhat preposterously hawking "tornado vanes" before he is run out of town by the authorities. When he first meets our drought-stricken (but not exactly suffering) family, we are as eager as Lizzie to dismiss him, for we understand that there's no way he's going to bring rain, and any money spent on his services might as well be thrown to the wind. Similarly, we see Lancaster as little more than a big Hollywood-handsome lout who we feel sure will eventually win over Lizzie and then -- because this is the 1950s -- settle down and have a family. Yawn. Except what's the deal with that red scarf he has tied around his neck? And what about his black shirt? Although we're usually not moved by this sort of thing, we begin to notice how nicely fitted it is -- it's basically painted on -- and how he doesn't even flinch when he spills half a glass of water down the front, so for a second his chest glistens under the light. His unwavering intensity is almost freakish -- yet disturbingly familiar -- and so we can't stop watching. As for Lizzie, she too begins to exert more influence, and we are increasingly moved by her plight (which is much more complicated than we had initially been led to believe by her shallow brothers); we even wonder why she won't give in to the Lancaster charm to which we have already proven so susceptible. The movie continues; as the brothers and the father bumble around the town, we suddenly understand that they are meant to be two-dimensional; they are symbols of three competing elements in American society -- the scornful, the idealistic and the resigned -- and it is against this backdrop that we watch the relationship between Lizzie and Starbuck (Lancaster) unfold, knowing that as outsiders they must come to terms with each other and the society around them. This is a complicated proposition, and Hepburn and Lancaster never make it anything but, so that their exchanges are filled with mounting desire, frustration -- and not just with each other -- and regret. Most incredibly the plot stays equally true to this conflict right up to the very end, when even as the rain comes pouring down, there are no easy answers for any of them. Or for that matter us; suddenly we understand that we too have been conned by The Rainmaker, but in the best way possible.

On the Incandescent Transience of the Rex Cole General Electric Appliance Empire

Let's imagine that your name is Rex Cole. You were born in 1887 in Port Huron, Michigan. You drop out of school at the age of 16 to become an electrician. Dissatisfied with the provincial life, you fight the tide of many millions and head east to New York City, where you save enough money to open up a small lamp-manufacturing facility. Time passes; deals are made and broken and made again, until in 1926 -- switching gears -- you win an exclusive franchise from General Electric to sell its fabulous new Monitor Top refrigerator. In less than five years you grow from one small office with four sales reps to a massive operation with over 1000 employees who work in and around the fantastic showrooms you are building all over New York City. These are modern, deco-inspired atriums added to the tops of existing buildings, with high vaulting steel arches and acres and acres of plate glass. People come just to look at the sprawling urban panorama that lies beyond the shining white brilliance of your enamel-coated product. Is it "too much"? Is it extreme and obsessive? There are whispers and innuendos -- what kind of man does this sort of thing? -- but what do you care? Revenue is over $15 million a year and you want to give your customers -- and the city you love -- something to remember. The Depression is not kind to your business; in 1935 you file for bankruptcy and watch as your holdings are sold off to pay your creditors. You emerge from this horribly shaken, and at times shattered: each one of these showrooms seems to have held some irretrievable part of your soul, and even though you offer promises of redemption, the words feel hollow in your mouth. You begin to long for nothing as much as sleep. You turn fifty and resign yourself to the fact that your affair with power and money has ended. One by one your showrooms are dismantled or covered in aluminum siding, while the trademark billboards you had also put up all over Manhattan and the Bronx -- in white enamel with the classic GE logo and your name below in a modern sans serif font -- are taken down to be discarded and recycled. But now you feel oddly unmoved, as if you are now only watching a movie about your past. You are relieved that nobody recognizes you on the street or asks you for money or autographs. As still more time passes and you enter the final decades of your life, you look back with even greater distance at the ruins of a personal destiny that seems to coincide with the city around you, which is increasingly marked by violent chaos and abandonment; entire swaths of neighborhoods you once knew so intimately are set on fire and left to burn. It's not that you don't love the city as much as you once loved your life, but neither lies within your grasp; you are eighty years old and there's nothing more you can do. The year is 1967. Forty years later almost every trace of your vast empire is gone; occasionally someone will look up and see one of the last of your weather-beaten signs -- the enamel now streaked with rust and grit -- hanging near the top of one of those grand, forgotten apartment palaces in Washington Heights. "Who was Rex Cole?" someone will ask, and nobody but you will know the answer.

 

On Behalf of Pottery, a Response to ESPN

Dear ESPN, we wanted to take a few seconds to let you know how much we hate your pottery-themed ad campaign. It might not even be running anymore; we first saw it in the back of a cab two months ago, or maybe it was even longer than that, but we saw it again last week and it all came flooding back. Sometimes we see things that make us so angry that we really don't even know how to wrap our minds around it until enough time passes. But we remember now; the first time we saw it was on Halloween weekend. We were coming back from that dive bar that used to be called "Saints" -- on Amsterdam and 109th, near Columbia -- but which has since had a sleazy makeover and, incredibly enough, is even more of a dive than ever. That night they had the worst drag queen in New York City; she went on at midnight and even though she was lipsyncing you would have sworn it was the first time she had ever heard the song because there wasn't even the semblance of a "routine" and she clearly didn't know any of the words. But we weren't looking for perfection; it was Halloween and half the people were dressed up as freaks and aliens, which made us wish that every weekend could be like that, because even in the city, sometimes you need to see something really different for a change. Not that you, ESPN, would know anything about that. So we're in the cab and completely amazed by the new credit-card machines (and still a bit drunk) when your spot comes up on the monitor and we see all the usual ESPN meatheads from "Sunday NFL Countdown." The set is a replica of one of those ridiculous pre-game "studios" with the desk and bad carpet everywhere and the large screen television, except the backdrop features pottery and shelving, similar to what you'd see in a real pottery studio; the next thing we know Chris Berman is like: "We're back with breaking news about clay and a huge stoneware show down in Seattle," before he turns it over to Mike Ditka, who despite possessing a single-digit IQ somehow manages, "the entire pottery community is gonna be watchin' this one," before it cuts back to Berman, who asks: "What can we look forward to as we jolly around the wheel?" as the background monitor superimposes this loathsome phrase -- in a very "girly" 1970s font -- over an image of a spinning pot. (As if any potter in the history of the universe has ever used the phrase, "jolly around the wheel.") So then we're taken to a couple of field correspondents who are actually sitting at a wheel -- one mutters something about "guilds" -- and then another at a kiln who promises a "special update" on slip-casting techniques before a final one promises to give us "glaze of the week" -- again we see this written in that same girly font -- at which point, ESPN, you jump in and deliver the smackdown: "LUCKY FOR US, THEY CHOSE FOOTBALL." Which brings us to our response on behalf of pottery: Fuck you, ESPN, for not only implying that football is somehow "better" than pottery, but for implying that pottery is "wussier" or "girlier" than football, which is a real man's world untainted by aesthetic choices about glazes and clays and form, i.e., all that art shit. Look, we understand that you only meant to "joke around," and we should stop being so "sensitive," but fuck you anyway, ESPN, because we're not stupid, we get the real joke, which is that from where you stand, pottery is "gay" -- just like fashion and opera and hairdressing and the publishing industry (if not very many of its books, sadly) -- and so like the schoolyard bully you think it's hilarious to prance around like a little queen for a few seconds, mocking and taunting, before you punch him in the gut; his ambivalence makes you angry, doesn't it, ESPN, because it strikes at the core of what's most important to you, which is that everyone in the whole fucking world should be just like you, mean and angry and vicious; anything less is for girls and faggots. As for us, ESPN -- in case you're wondering -- we won't be watching any professional sports, especially on your stupid station (not that the others are any better). Who's in the playoffs? Who cares? Who's in the Super Bowl? Who cares? We don't, that's for sure. And just to be clear, ESPN, we're not interested in censoring you or seeking any kind of "apology"; we believe in free speech as a rule -- even when we find it insulting -- and this is no exception. So advertise away to your idiotic fans, ESPN, but rest assured we won't ever be among them. We'd rather look at a single piece of pottery for ten days than watch ten minutes of your self-aggrandizing macho bullshit.

 

The City and the Pillar

In which The Gay Recluse looks back at a classic of post-war American fiction written in a gay voice. Admittedly, to read Gore Vidal's 1946 novel The City and the Pillar is to be thrown with startling efficiency into what has to be one of the bleakest periods in history, the post-war era of the United States. What we see in this story is not the superficial optimism exhibited by a young country making its debut as a world power, however, but the stifling conformity that comes with it, so that we as readers (if we want to have any fun here) must pretend to be shocked -- as the rest of the world apparently was 60 years ago -- by Vidal's stiff descriptions of a most ordinary affair between a couple of dim-witted high school jocks. Which is not to say it isn't an enlightening read; what we love about this book is Vidal's unflinching attachment -- already present at the age of 21, when he wrote it -- to a truth that resonates as much today as it did then, namely the idea that homosexuality is more often than not located in the domain of the otherwise unremarkable lives led by those less flamboyant souls who shun the spotlight and seek only the most ordinary pleasures life has to offer. Vidal, it should be noted, did not set out to create anything otherwise; he wanted his prose to reflect the "normal" (which is to say, stereotypically masculine) appearance of his characters, and their reluctance to engage in anything resembling introspection. If there is torment to be found -- and there is, as "Jim" drifts through the book pining for his old friend "Bob" (yes, even the names are dull) -- it is a torment closer in spirit to a seventh-grade crush than anything we might describe as existential, and so leads to quite a few scenes that -- even when rendered with Vidal's flat prose -- tread dangerously close to camp when taken in by a more modern eye. (One example: Jim and one of his sailor buddies are on leave and go home with a couple of girls they picked up in a bar; Jim tries his best to play along, but abruptly leaves the scene after being too disgusted by the sight of a naked woman. "Let the queer go! I got enough for two," growls the buddy, who is already busy with the other girl.) So yes, there's a temptation to smile throughout much of this book, particularly if we think of the spirit of say, John Waters or Paul Morrissey hovering about, recreating these same wooden, trashy scenes with a cast of incredible freaks. Of course it's unfair, but it's almost impossible to resist drawing on such an arsenal, when it's so much more potent in exposing the ludicrous nature of suburban convention than the dreary (if more realistic) style of Vidal (at least in this novel; we must remember that he is only 21 and has many great books in front of him). But any smiles quickly give way to a pervasive melancholy as we envision Vidal writing this book, particularly in his attempts to emulate his hero Thomas Mann, as he admits having done in an essay published in the mid-1980s (included in a new edition of the book published by Vintage in 2003). "I was struck by the use of dialogue in The Magic Mountain," Vidal writes, "particularly the debates between Settembrini and Naphta, as each man subtly vies for the favors of the dim but sexually attractive Hans Castorp." What's telling here is that these scenes from The Magic Mountain were -- at least for us -- by far the least compelling in the book, for they consisted of Mann's pedantic summaries of two competing strains of German philosophy, and so offered almost nothing to the underlying drama of the book. For Vidal, it seems that the beauty of Magic Mountain -- namely Mann's descriptions of the otherworldly sense of time and geography, of literally hovering above one's former life in a cloud of malaise (not to mention the lush language in which Mann describes all of this) -- was completely lost on him. The City and the Pillar comes across as the work of a young writer working in a world bereft of magic or potential, and it is this world he so faithfully reproduces on the page. To put in another way, we finish the book not with a sense of being transported by great literature but of having just watched a very disturbing documentary. What's even worse -- and more tragic -- is the creeping suspicion that, sixty years later, not much has really changed in this regard; of course we're inured to the sexually explicit, but what is still lacking in so much of modern life (and the literature that reflects it) is a sense of -- for lack of a better word -- magic, the illogical means by which we escape what is both painful, and painfully obvious. 

On Bruised and Misshapen Clementines

In which The Gay Recluse writes in highly attenuated metaphors about the Democratic primaries in Michigan.

Regular readers of The Gay Recluse may remember when -- a long time ago, perhaps even as many as ten days -- we wrote about our preference for Sweeties® Clementines after a high-stakes 'taste-off' with Cuties® California Clementines. Rather than settling the matter, however, our decision only fueled the proverbial fire, and to this day -- as you all know -- debate rages over which Clementine offers the most delightful and refreshing citrus "experience." Now, ten days later -- time we spent reflecting on this important issue -- we were eager to see if and how the situation had changed. We had placed our order with Fresh Direct and the delivery had arrived. As we unpacked the goods, our mind raced with questions: Would the Cutie peels still be saggy and withered? Would the fruit swim with seeds, any one of which can cause a most disturbing crunch? Would each segment be uniformly sweet? As for Sweeties, would they still be delightfully juicy, with a zesty flavor and fragrance that make it impossible to eat just one? Alas, we regret to inform you that a definitive response on this most critical of issues must wait. Although the Clementines arrived as scheduled, they were not delivered in a box of white balsa wood and paper adorned with our favorite Clementine slogans -- "So Sweet!" "Easy To Peel!" -- but were carelessly jammed into a generic mesh bag that gave no indication at all as to their origin. Furthermore, all of the fruit was horribly lumpy and misshapen, and the taste was not much better, with segment after segment exhibiting a hard, fibrous texture that made us think of apples! True, based on our prior assessment, we were inclined to say these sad specimens were Cuties, but it hardly seems fair to castigate without the hard evidence we so clearly lacked. By the same token, we doubted that these could be Sweeties, but isn't history filled with victories that in retrospect are the harbinger of steep decline? We admit disappointment but not defeat; we have ordered more Clementines and expect them to arrive soon.

 

On the Architectural Ghost Next Door

Given the long-ascendant Manhattan real-estate market, people are often surprised to learn the extent to which abandoned, burned-out property still plagues Harlem and Washington Heights. On our block alone -- which is not even close to one of the worst around here -- there are three completely annihilated townhouse 'shells' and several other larger buildings that are certainly 'shellish' if not quite destroyed. We see four reasons why shells languish, even in a "hot" market: 1) carrying costs are low in relation to market appreciation, 2) construction costs are high, 3) the city bureaucracy involved in digging these properties out of legal limbo is insanely complicated to negotiate, and 4) the 'upside' in terms of market value is enormous when you consider the high likelihood of gentrification at some point, thanks to the crushingly gorgeous (pre-war) housing stock and (short) commute to midtown. Basically, if you can get your sleazy hands on one of these things -- and given the complexities of buying one, there's inevitably some sleaze involved -- there's no real incentive to renovate when you can just let it rot for ten more years and then sell it for ten times as much as you paid. It's a situation that really does cry out for city-government intervention (try not to laugh.) Owners of abandoned buildings must be heavily penalized to force them into action (i.e., sell, renovate, or lose the property in foreclosure). This would require a concerted effort by the mayor, city council and probably at least five agencies (led by the notoriously sluggish and ambivalent HPD). Like, good luck with that. But politics aside -- and on a more personal note -- we live right next door to a shell (thank you, thank you!). Certain problems notwithstanding -- which we shall unveil in due course -- the situation is not without its advantages (namely, no neighbors and again, our longstanding obsession with ruins). People often ask us what it's like -- as if we were suffering from a chronic condition -- and so in response we would like to offer a chronology of our relationship with the architectural ghost next door.

May 1999. Our first visit to the block, where we politely ignore the shell's obvious handicaps in light of the deal we are getting on our prospective house. Someone predicts that the entire block will be 'spotless' within a decade and we nod enthusiastically. We are young and hip and -- having lived for so long in Park Slope -- still very very naive.

December 1999. We close on our Manhattan townhouse (the price is good). The shell next door -- ugly as it is -- does not seem unhappy. We think we have come to an understanding.

May 2000. With spring comes an increasing awareness that the lot next door (i.e., the backyard of the shell) -- separated from our yard with a chain link fence -- is in fact filled with a Fresh-Kills quantity of trash, construction debris and junkie refuse (lighters, bent spoons, dime bags, etc.) from the last however many decades people have been dumping shit there (literal and metaphorical senses of 'shit'). We plant morning glories in front of our fence and try to pretend it's not there.

December 2000. It occurs to us that perhaps we should do some investigation of the shell: like who owns it and would they consider say, giving it to us for nothing if we promised to fix it up? (Insert idiot joke here.) After doing a title search, we learn that the city has in fact brought a foreclosure action against the shell; we eventually track down the HPD attorney in charge of the case, who shockingly enough is not unfriendly; she tells us that she expects to have a judgment in the near future, at which point the property will be auctioned off to the highest bidder in the rotunda of the State Supreme Court. (Note that this is a very different process from when the city actually takes possession of land and resells it; in a foreclosure action they simply get the proceeds from a judicially administered auction. Also note that while we have some familiarity with the law -- thanks to a law degree from a very prestigious institution (ahem) -- we are not real-estate lawyers.) We learn from various sources that these auctions are filled with sleazy sharks but we try not to be intimidated; after all, who is going to want a shell in Washington Heights more than us? We love our shell, and it loves us! Plus, you only need ten-percent cash to bid at the auction, after which you get 90 days to line up financing. We have some savings and our credit is good; why shouldn't we win? (Insert idiot joke #2 here.)

May 2001. It turns out that the pile of junk next door has over the course of the winter been repopulated by a proverbial army of rats, who are not deterred by the chain-link fence from entering our backyard garden, even through a screen of morning glories. (We should also mention that there is another shell three doors up in the other direction, so that our collective backyards are essentially a 'Rat Disney World.') For some reason, the rats like to shit right outside our back door, as if taunting us. On behalf of our plants, we are annoyed.

December 2001. We're still calling our contact at HPD, who tells us that 9/11 has slowed things down. We believe her. May 2002. After a year of calling various city agencies, we finally -- by way of a local Community Board worker (thank you Deborah!) -- manage to get some trash-hauling division of a city agency (not Sanitation, of course) to clear out the junk next door. It takes an entire crew of twelve men two weeks to get rid of all of it. Filled with visions of garden grandeur, we take down the chain-link fence (as we had already done with our real neighbor on the other side) and put it up on the far edge of the vacant lot above a retaining wall, effectively doubling our garden space. We subscribe to Horticulture' magazine and become increasingly transfixed by moss, ferns and native perennials. We hire a tree service to cut down some monstrously invasive ailanthus trees (aka 'Ann Coulters') that have been looming over our garden. We plant wisteria in front of the fence, which incredibly enough covers the whole thing in about a week and jumps the alley beyond, where it starts invading an apartment -- we can see the vine behind the windows, wrapped behind some ugly curtains -- in the adjacent building; even more incredibly, whoever lives there doesn't seem to care. We talk about "adversely possessing" the land we have cultivated; research, however, shows this is next to impossible in New York State.

December 2002. After two years of regularly calling our contact at HPD -- who never has any information for us but (in her not unfriendly way) keeps telling us to call back in a few months -- we learn that she has left on maternity leave. Nobody else can tell us anything about the house (nor do they seem at all happy to talk to us). We are too young and naïve to pursue this with the zeal of an investigative reporter; we have full-time jobs already and the work of owning (and renting a portion of) one house makes the prospect of a second less palatable. We tell ourselves that we don't care who buys it, as long as someone does.

May 2003. The rats, of course, are also living inside of the shell, and so are not that bothered by losing the trash heap outside. Nor are they unappreciative of our fine efforts in the garden: in fact, they have grown accustomed to twilight strolls, during which Mom and Dad leisurely take in the green as the children cavort in the brush. As part of a downstairs renovation in our house, we decide to abandon the double-plot garden and erect a five-foot cement wall topped by three feet of wooden lattice to separate us from the vacant lot (we continue to leave the border with our neighbor open, thinking that most of the rats are coming from the shell next door and not the one three houses away). We later find out that the rats are laughing at us the whole time.

December 2003. We start receiving mail addressed to a woman next door, who we learn managed to acquire title to the house, but not through a foreclosure auction. Exactly how remains a -- and perhaps the -- longstanding mystery of the shell, given its current status and her reputation uptown. (At some later date we will mention this woman's name to Rob Shapiro from Massey Knakal and he will turn pale.) However, our spirits are soon lifted when, around this time, an impressive looking sign from Marcus Millichap goes up on the fence in front of the shell; we call the realtor who tells us that the seller wants 'only' 750k for the shell. We politely ask him to put down his crack pipe and explain the economics to him: the place (3200 square feet, just like ours) will cost at least 700k to renovate (nothing fancy mind you), which means that you would be in for like $1.5 before you even got started, or way more than any house is worth in the neighborhood. Even if best case scenario you could convert it into 4 floor-through 1BRs at $1500 per, that only pays for about 900k in financing, tops (i.e., not investment material). Basically, only an insane maniac would pay 750k for this shell, and we're in Washington Heights, not Williamsburg. We tell him that we would consider buying it for 100k; he laughs in our face. The shell does not sell, but we do not feel vindicated.

May 2004. We go to war with the rats. We put out traps and catch one by its foot, which leads to a horrible scene in which we literally have to beat it to death with a shovel in order to put it out of its misery. Another time we throw a rock at one as it's streaking across the yard and -- because we played baseball for a few years -- we actually hit it. This too we have to kill as it woozily staggers around. Like any soldier, we are shocked by the depraved lengths to which we will go in the heat of battle.

December 2004. The kids from the apartment building on the other side of the shell have turned the Marcus Millichap sign into the backboard for a basketball hoop. Eventually it falls off and it sits in the middle of the street, where it dissolves into oblivion.

May 2005. In a last-ditch effort to fend off the rats, we decide to surround our garden with an 8-foot cement/stucco wall. We start referring to the backyard as a 'courtyard.' There is severe collateral damage to the existing plants, but in the end it's worth it: for the first time we are "rat free," a condition we continue to enjoy to this day (knock on wood), although we still see them running back and forth on the electrical wires overhead.

December 2005. We continue to write letters to everyone in the city begging them to do something about the nasty shell next door, not only because of the rats (and pigeons, which -- trust us -- really aren't as bad) but because of the roof, which has by this point completely given way, so that the entire structure appears to be in danger of collapse. HPD only has jurisdiction over the front of the building, so we turn to DOB, which promptly dismisses our complaint after a 'drive-by' inspection. We schedule another appointment and invite them to assess the damage from our roof, and the inspector agrees that the building looks very shaky; he takes pictures of the collapsed roof; nevertheless, our complaint is subsequently dismissed. This continues until we succeed in having the building officially classified as 'unsafe.' Still nothing happens.

May 2006. The courtyard recovers with a new plant regime; the house next door continues to rot and crumble. A paper trail on the house -- now available on Property Shark -- shows the house is owned by some bank in Cleveland. Or maybe it's a bankrupt construction company from Westchester. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on; in any case, we still couldn't afford to renovate it, even if someone gave it to us. December 2006. Occasionally somebody will walk by and look at the shell and let us know that they are a prospective buyer. Some of these people are Russians in fur coats. Some are from Brazil. Nobody will ever divulge who exactly is selling this property, even when we ask directly for this information. The most we can ever get is that it as part of a 'portfolio.' There is apparently a secret world that we are not a part of; we don't exactly want in, but it would be nice to film it.

May 2007. Our courtyard/fortress endures in the back, but the rats -- obviously infuriated -- have now taken to the sidewalks and street with renewed strength. Garbage regulations are not exactly enforced with vigor at the apartment buildings down the street. Between the shells and these buildings, our block is rat heaven; if you visit after dark, remember to walk in the street.

December 2007. Nothing to report. Have we mentioned that our annual taxes are $0.00? We say this to let you know that the carrying costs of a shell are not exactly overwhelming, even if you factor in the thousands of dollars of tickets each year the shell gets for not cleaning the sidewalk. Now. In our dreams, the city is about to put a roof on the shell, shore up the foundations, and charge the owner, whoever and wherever he/she/it is located. In truth it's basically a disaster waiting to happen, and unlike the old fable, we've repeatedly cried wolf and meant it every time. As appreciative as we are of own our house in a rising market, we sometimes think bitterly about whoever slimed this property into their possession, and how -- if it doesn't collapse first (and maybe even if it does) -- they will make a killing whenever they decide to sell it. Sometimes the shell seems to leer at us; other times we feel sorry for it. Most of all we pray for its resurrection in the hands of someone who will restore it to the dignity with which it was built, and then -- as we do in ours -- live in it. Less naive than we once were, we don't expect this to happen very soon.

On the English Elm of Washington Heights

It is not just the old architecture of Washington Heights that sends us spinning back in time to a period that was -- if nothing else -- more grand and spacious than what we see now. Take the corner of 163rd and St. Nicholas, just north of Amsterdam, which is one of the ugliest intersections in the neighborhood, thanks to a pharmacy that occupies the triangular plot just to the south but which has been now abandoned for several years. (We were once informed by a Community Board 12 member that this land was slated to be turned into a city park, but a parks representative later denied the rumor, and not without indignation at the implication that the local kids lack sufficient playgrounds; in any case, like so much around here, the pharmacy sits rotting and abandoned to this day.) Walking north past this boarded-up blight, the corner at first seems relatively unremarkable; on the west side of the avenue, under a series of decaying pre-war apartment palaces, we find the usual mix of bodegas and take-out joints, none of which lifts the barren and ominous atmosphere of the area, accentuated by the piles of trash on the sidewalks and the groups of thugs we pass on the corner. The eastern side of the street is quieter; here we find a very bland post-war housing project, which ugly as it is at least has the benefit of being no more than four stories tall and thus that much more humane than the Robert Moses monstrosities that plague uptown Manhattan. Still, we are not here to greet the architecture, but to dream of a past some 230 years ago, when the land was part of the Morris-Jumel estate, the very spot from which George Washington watched the British take New York city in the early hours of the Revolutionary War. The mansion of course is still standing, but even older than this is what we now stop to admire; here, just north of the eastern corner of 163rd Street we confront an English Elm that is one of the oldest and tallest trees in the city; we have also heard it referred to as -- simply -- "The Dinosaur." We approach the tree in awe and reverence; we circle it slowly (it is close to six feet in diameter*) and stare up into its infinite branches (it is 110 feet tall*); we imagine George crying bitter tears of defeat in this very spot (for we know the tree was there at the time) and making vows of revenge. Time passes and the dream lifts; we remember where we are and feel indignant on behalf of the tree; it seems cruel and unfair that this remarkable specimen of infinite age and beauty should have been made to witness this most brutal transformation of the surrounding landscape from idyllic pasture to urban ghetto! We wait a few more minutes and the feeling passes. The tree is clearly unmoved by our pity; it longs for nothing but light and water and nutrients from the soil; and doesn't its very existence testify to the satisfaction of these longings? Suddenly, we too feel pleasantly old and resigned, unconcerned by the ongoing travails of life as it unfolds around us.

View of English Elm -- aka "The Dinosaur" -- at St. Nicholas and 163rd Street, looking south, taken on 11/7/07.

*Tree measurements provided by Edward Sibley Barnard, New York City Trees (Columbia University Press 2002). (We have a signed edition.) Postscript: The New York Times City Room has also reported that this tree is one of only twenty-five from around the city that has been selected to be reproduced via tree grafting/cloning techniques with the thought to plant identical trees in a few years. Although we are disappointed that Bravo did not make this selection process a reality show, we feel honored to be acquainted with such a deserving winner!