When we’re advocating for places we love,
or that embrace meaning in our communities,
we sometimes speak of those places
as harboring “cultural capital,” a kind of
“social currency.” But what if there were
an actual currency of memory and meaning
to prevent places with deep roots in a
community from being sold or displaced?
What if memories, associations, and values
were transformed into units of meaningful
exchange?
New York City
Downstate
Every New Yorker who has ridden the subways for any length of time eventually cracks. The announcements are incomprehensible, the trains get stuck for seemingly no reason. On a particular day in 2003, even the air conditioner didn’t work in the car, and, yes, I cracked. I stormed out of the F train, which was stuck at West 4th Street, ran over to the motorman’s window and was about to give him a piece of my mind. When I saw the motorman and he saw me, we both burst out laughing.
Commentary:
In a 1935 letter to his fellow pulp fiction author and one-time collaborator E. Hoffman Price, Howard Phillips Lovecraft explained that he “always preferred to use established folklore legends as little as possible” and strove to “invent his own fantastic violations of natural law” (Lovecraft 1976). This statement might surprise both casual and longtime readers of Lovecraft and his genre breaking horror and science fiction.
Feeding the Ancestors:
Śrāddha is a Hindu calendrical ritual involving the offering of food to one’s ancestors. In this article, I trace the adaptation and diffusion of this ancient ritual in the context of diasporic and generational shifts. My paternal aunt, Shanta Nimbark-Sacharoff, described the migration from her small Indian village to New York, in the 1960s, where, together with her beloved elder brother, she discovered a newfound fascination with her family’s traditional foodways. Particularly, since her brother’s sudden passing, she has revived the annual observance of śrāddha, during which she always prepares “okra bhaji” to propitiate his soul.
Italian American Foodways in Pigtown
I was born and raised in Pigtown, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, that is located, roughly speaking, between Empire Blvd. to the North and Kings County Hospital to the South. It also spans Rogers to Schenectady Avenues….Some people tended small gardens, and some, like my neighbor across the street,
kept rabbits in their yard and occasionally grilled them. Others had pigeon coops, and there was an endless array of street peddlers selling all manner of things.
The Demand Calls for It:
In her poem “Exodus and Consumption,” Audrey Rodríguez traces a mango’s movement away from its Tapachulan soil. The fruit is “sun-kissed and watered” for five years, “thrown into a basket by tiny hands / Taken for a hot bath” before being sent to the US/Mexico border for agricultural inspection. “Kill the invasive Mexican fruit flies / The demand calls for it.”
Grilled Cheese
There is no shortage of paeans to
New York diner culture. Sliding into
a slightly sticky faux leather booth, nursing
a hot cup of coffee, poring over an endless
menu. A good diner does not surprise
but rather delights you with the comfort of
familiarity. Diners dot the memories of my
Long Island upbringing,…
Foodways
At Yankee Stadium, béisbol is as American
as alcapurrias—those plump, golden-brown
plantain patties stuffed with seasoned beef.
It’s so from the sunken rye and bluegrass
sod field to the breeziest bleacher top.
With roughly thirty percent of United
States baseball players now of foreign-born
Hispanic heritage and the House that
Ruth Built smack dab in one of the most
established Puerto Rican communities in
the nation, large, hungry, thirsty crowds
have directed the market toward foods
that reflect fans’ cultural heritage.
Downstate
“I am the accumulated memory and
waistline of the dead restaurants of New
York,” writes the poet Bob Hershon, “and the
dishes that will never be set before us again…” I’m with
Hershon—for where but in memory can I
ever again find the spicy taste of the prah
prig sod at Siam Square, with its unique mix
of lemon grass and spiced peppers? Ingested
into our very beings, these tastes play a part
in our social gatherings and, later, can define
our fondest memories.
Still Going Strong
Karen Sell is a modern practitioner of
the age-old craft of wig making. A native
of Singapore, Karen studied hairstyling in
England, where she also took a course in wig
making. She worked as a stylist for the Vidal
Sassoon salons in London, then later in New
York when she immigrated to this country in
the late 1980s. In New York, she also worked
as a stylist at a salon that made wigs. There,
she styled and maintained wigs for clients,
then established her own wig-making business
about fifteen years ago.
Downstate
Why do folklorists and scholars of
play so rarely explore the playful aspects
of sex? Perhaps, as I’ve always suspected,
a prudish element runs through the discipline.
Or perhaps, despite the similarities,
sex and children’s play seem to exist in separate
universes. Nonetheless, any folklorist
or ethnographer seeking to understand
New York City, in particular, can’t do so
without acknowledging a side of the city’s
life that attracts people from all over the
world for its anonymity and permissiveness.
Songs
New York City is special by any measure.
Who would think that “Finnegan’s Wake”—
immortalized by James Joyce, the ultimate
Dubliner—was actually written in Manhattan?
It’s true. John F. Poole, a theater manager and
writer, composed “Tim Finigan’s Wake” for
the singer-entrepreneur Tony Pastor sometime
around the beginning of the Civil War. It appears
in Pastor’s “444” Combination Songster, first
published in 1864…
Foodways
Long before our contemporary chefs developed
the New American cuisine, farmers
and horticulturists were the custodians of
taste, walking their orchards, vineyards, and
vegetable fields sampling fruits and saving
seeds from the most cleverly delicious tree,
bush, or vine. For a contemporary farmer to
grow a Bronx Seedless grape is to reclaim
that custodial role after almost a century
and reposition farmers as the guardians of
flavor and their family-owned farms as the
sanctuaries of quality.
Xiao Xiannian:
It was a beautiful spring day in Chinatown when I stopped by the Mencius Society to talk with Xiao Xiannian, a virtuoso of the Chinese hammered dulcimer known as the yangqin. Housed in a building on Grand Street near its intersection with Delancey, the Mencius Society—also known as the AiCenter, formerly the Wossing Center—provides instruction in Chinese and Western musical instruments, as well as a number of other arts education programs for youth and adults. It is also the home base of the EastRiver Ensemble, one of New York’s leading Chinese music groups.
From Central Park Rumba with Love
Central Park Rumba is an internationally known music event. I first heard about it in Mexico City in 1980, described in great detail by Cesar Sandoval, a drummer who had lived in New York and frequented the rumba circle in the 1970s …When traveling to Havana to visit my family in the 1990s, rumberos (rumba drummers) and other musicians asked me if I knew their rumba friends from Union City, the Bronx, and Central Park. I arrived at my first CP Rumba the second week of
September 1994, my first week living in the city. There in Central Park, I was told that rumba was addictive. I got hooked! I became a regular to the scene.