Classical restraint

Living close to the roller-coaster of emotions - it's a real phenomenon of US culture. Reality show after TV Reality Show follows people who have nothing better to do in their lives than fight like cats. The Housewives of Springfield or Lafayetteville or Nataucka flare up over the smallest triviality and hold grudges for weeks on end only to resolve them in 'full and frank' (televised) discussions which just degenerate almost immediately into another round of finger-pointing and feuding.

Even last Saturday, we got to overhear emotions just under the surface as a Miss Cellphone lived her life out in full in our train carriage. This was on our way out see one of American Opera Projects' works-in-progress at Princeton (a sedate activity, matching the university-town atmosphere you'd think - look at the bicycles for heaven's sake!)



From our end of the conversation (overheard), we were able to construct an entire biography of the caller. ''Cos yo' ass don't work 9 to 5, Mr Judah P. Washington Jr,' she says, justifying yelling at a recalcitrant boyfriend who then gets her off track by mentioning a film he's been watching. 'Was it in 3D?' she asks, and you wonder whether she might get further with the guy if she can stay on track in what is an apparently serious argument. By the time we get off we've got her entire life in a nutshell - 29 years old, one daughter, a whole life which is run as instantaneous response to external stimulus.

In the main street of Princeton we pass this marker:

I once read some praise of the Declaration of Independence; that it was a remarkably classical document, sublimating its rage in lofty objective language. It may have been a lucky coincidence for Americans that their revolution occurred in an age of enlightenment, when people set store by rational argument. I wonder if they could have formed a lasting government if they'd been governed and overwhelmed at that time by yo-yoing emotions?

Mind you, I suppose we're now seeing (in the deficit debate) whether a nation so swayed can long endure.

The continuing past

For weeks now we have been looking at this structure in Inwood Hill Park and I finally asked the ranger what it was.

It's a Lenape wigwam. He said it was built by Lenape people from New Jersey who still maintain it. The frame is White Pine and it's clad with slabs of Tulipwood (which is anti-fungal) and Beech, which are all native to the area. The Park is gradually weeding out the Norwegian Maple which was planted here in previous generations.

I was interested that there are Lenape people still in New Jersey, though during Removal they 'went' as far as Nebraska and Montreal (and stayed). And it's nice to know that the traditional crafts are still alive.

This reminds me of the wiltjas I saw at Pipalyatjara in northern South Australia (100 miles south of Uluru) back in 1976. When I went out to a similarly remote area three years later, the wiltjas were made of corrugated iron and hessian bags, although that doesn't mean that the knowledge of the craft is no longer alive.

A riff on a historical landscape

Since we're good walkers and New York is a walking city, we decided to visit the historical sites of northern Manhattan today, starting at 204th Street around the corner, and working our way downtown from Duyckman's Farm, the house built up here in 1784.

The Hessians were camped on the Duyckmans' property in 1776 and the original farmhouse closer to the Harlem River, northeast of here, was destroyed during the Revolutionary War, which is why Duyckman decided to rebuild his farmhouse here instead, at the corner of 204th and Broadway (as it is now), after he returned from upstate (where he'd kept his head down during hostilities).

The Hessians' huts were dug into slopes around here and I didn't realise that when they were doing archeological work up here in 1915 Pelham Bolton found remnants of their huts in the hill on Payson Ave, visible outside the window where I've been working.

I also noticed, from a period map reproduced on a plaque in the grounds that Spuyten Duyvil, the waterway up near the conjunction of the Harlem River and Hudson, was once translated as Spitting Devil, rather than 'in spite of the devil', but I guess this still denotes a dangerous stretch of water.

From Duyckman's we walked to 160th Street, traversing the street-level cityscape we've been missing each time we've caught the 'A', and arrived at the Morris-Jumel Mansion at 160th Street. Washington used this house as his headquarters in 1776.

On 10 July, 1790, in the first year of his presidency, he invited his cabinet up here for a day trip from the capitol downtown. I can imagine Washington, Vice President Adams, Secretary of State Jefferson, Treasury Secretary Hamilton and Adams' son, John Quincy, coming through this foyer reminiscing about the days when the outcome of the struggle was far from certain and whether they would all escape with their lives.

Hamilton wouldn't have known that the house would one day, in 1833, become the home of a former vice president Aaron Burr, the man who would take his life in a duel in1804.

Did the party look out this window?

Washington would surely have. His office during the war was back of here, in an octagonal room (if not quite an oval office).

Around the corner, at 16 Jumel Place, is a fine old Victorian building which was once the home of Paul Robeson.

We weathered the heat (how did people cope in 1790? I was in shorts) to walk on down to 141st Street where Hamilton's 'country retreat' is now located.

Here is the home of one of America's founding geniuses. I admire Hamilton not just because he found a financial underpinning for the infant republic in the 1790s, but because he espoused the idea of 'implied powers'. He believed as did the whole revolutionary generation that governments are instituted among men to ensure their welfare. Hamilton argued that the consitution gave the government certain powers to achieve that end and that government had the right to do whatever is necessary to achieve the ends specified to it. In 1790, he and Jefferson were yet to become as bitterly opposed as they would eventually become. Jefferson believed in a more literal reading of the constitution: government cannot assume any power not specifically delegated to it. I love Jefferson's idea that everyone should have a farm, but I'm glad that in arguments before Washington, Hamilton usually won out. In the early 1800s, after Hamilton was dead, Adams and Jefferson also fell out over similar positions, but in the last years of their lives, resumed their friendship. (A lesson for today's opponents? Even Burr on his deathbed is supposed to have said, 'I've realised, all too late, that there is room in the world for an Alexander Hamilton and an Aaron Burr.')

This is the house's third move since the 1890s, but it is now only two blocks from its original location at W143rd, and on land which was once Hamilton's estate. This is now St. Nicholas' Park, and when you come out of it, you're in sugar Hill, where Duke Ellington once lived. Downtown is still some way away, and you can see the Empire State Building in the distance.

We were tempted to walk on to the Gershwin House at 103rd - not really, we were beat. The temperature was in the 90s. So we went only as far as 125th Street. It's Harlem, but I thought I was hallucinating when I looked across the road and saw this building.

We'd been trying to evoke a sense of New York 200 years ago, and we see this. Ignore the Jimmy Jazz sign, this building wouldn't look out of place in Prahran - Chapel Street!!!

Traversing the actual lengths

One of the great pleasures of actually being in the United States, as opposed to studying it from afar, is unbinding the false sense of distances that your imagination has created from dozens or hundreds of movies or books. It's a revelation to learn that it is actually quite a long way from one end of Manhattan to the other or that Pennsylvania is actually quite close to New York. I love to see the lie of the land and feel the topography of battles. For instance, just outside Chinatown is this plaque:

It says that Washington assembled his troops at this spot for their victory march into New York in 1783. Into New York? It's a long way downtown now, and the environs look like this:

Back then, of course, it was on the outside of the 'city'.

Then there is the spread of the city. From the look of this, looking over Long Island Sound, who'd believe it was in The Bronx?

It's actually City Island, which was founded as a fishing village in 1625. In the parks around New York you can tell which languages have overlaid the streets from signs banning smoking in parks. In Inwood, the signs are in English, Spanish and Russian (Cyrillic). Here on City Island they are in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole ('Pa fimen nan pak la'). Just think: Dutch was once most prevalent around here, an interesting fact to remember only a week after 4 July. The sign above the Washington assembly-area plaque is in Hanzi. Would Washington have anticipated Chinese in this area in 1783? And who knows: in about 100 years, it'll probably be some sort of Hispano-English spoken in New York. Australians will feel less at home here then.

I spend some time thinking of the exact difference between here and there. I doubt you'd find a statue of Verdi in Australia and a local (not me) who could explain to Japanese tourists who Verdi was and why his statue's here (at W73rd Street). And you wouldn't see fireflies in the twilit grass around either him or the local.


Here are some other things to tell you you're in New York:

- guys really do hang out of their windows in singlets in the summer,
- people have full-blown fights on cellphones in the street - 'You set me up!'
- rap-dancers and preachers start up their performances in train carriages; they time their presentations to the space between express stops,
- you turn a corner and hear two cops discussing where you bleed out from the most,
- people are astonished when you tell them Sydneysiders complain about the cold when it gets to 60F, and
- people are astonished when you tell them government funds the arts to about 60%

Travelling through Pennsylvania on the weekend (to hear a recital of Ragtime in a Brethren church), I think I worked out why many Americans think the financial crisis is none of the government's business - because all the empy factories they see around their desolate city industry-scapes are private companies - Franklin's Rubber, Osborne's Electric, Johnsons' Ball-bearing and Runner Factory.

As I said, you get some surprising revelations as you travel around the country. And by the way, have you noticed that most people pronounce Pennsylvania as if it's Pencil-vania, not Penn-sylvania?

If you agreed, here is a bonus: a list of New Jersey Native American words:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~njmorris/general_info/indian.htm#Glossary

I'm intrigued by the number of places that end in 'pany', as in Whippany. I think it means 'place of'.