ADAM!!! Good grief, you were off-line so long I was honestly worried!
I was just asking Bobby Wilson if you'd been in Boston at the ACGA or if he'd heard anything. Haven't actually read your post yet, but glad to have you back! fgc -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 31, 2007 11:34 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Community_garden] Thinking of Mrs. Astor,Spring & the Closing of a Hospital Friends, I've been under the weather of late,? and like many folks living with the "black dog,"??misplaced?my sense of humor. ?So I've not been writing much about gardens & life on Manhattan Island as I have in the past - the "buzzing, booming mass", as the psychologist James brother described an infant's world (and best describes, in my humble opinion, ?life in my fair city without a sense of humor) overwhelms without a a sense of the absurd, or cheerful, Dickensian bloodymindedness.? But tonight, I'll try to manage, because the justapostion of he stars as they shine through the klieg lights of this town have inspired me to - please bear with me, I'm out of practice. My home computer broken, I'm sitting at a "rent-a-computer," in a boite called "The Coffee Pot," a?entreprenurial two unit coffee seller?near World Wide Plaza on 49th & 9th (the former site of the penultimate, ?second Madison Square Garden that?was the New Yorker's Liebling's "Garden," inspiration for his magesterial book on boxing "The Sweet Science," ) However, the ?heavily muscled gentlemen using this coffee emporium's bank of rent-a-?computers this evening are not pugilists, but gentlemen fresh from the gym, trolling chat rooms and Craig's list for company.? A way of preserving one's liver while persuing Venus, or Cupid.? One is a gardener - I guess his computer is, "on the?Fritz," to use?another ancient phrase.?? Washington Irving's Diedrich ?Knickerbocker, the old 9th Avenue elevated railway, the pushcarts of? "Paddy's Market," the real Hell's Kitchen ( "Hell's a frigid clime compared to this,") as compared to the current fashionable "Heck's Kitchen," the old Madison Square Garden, Damon Runyon, and shadows of times past....Mad Dog Coll was gunned down a block from where I type. Shadows real among the Starbuck's and cybercafes. That said, it's the cusp of fall, and asters are starting to bloom as the last burst of color in our New York Gardens, along with the burgeoning Dahlia show.? Mrs Brooke Astor, whose grants have enriched out public life here in NYC ( and purchased the gate and irrigation system of the Clinton Community Garden) died a few weeks ago at 105 (none younger should die) in comfort and deeply beloved by all.? I saw our Asters blooming in the CCG as I rushed in to place a bulb order for the spring, an act of optimism that currently amazes me - the future tense is hard for the depressed to parse... The garden is beautiful, new brick paths are growing, there is nothing better than a well established garden - after having put in my bulb order, I walked uptown towards my digs and came across the wake for St. Vincent's Midtown Hospital, the former St. Clare's where my late nurse wife Allegra worked for many years. St. Clare's a voluntary Catholic hospital, founded by the Sisters of Albany ( a largely defunct order, these days) served the poor in Hell's Kitchen, that the grandees at the French?& Polyclinic Hospitals (also defunct) would not touch, and were too southern for Roosevelt or?St. Luke's ?Hospital. While?Hell's Kitchen?is renascent, fillled with construction cranes, Broadway Theaters and the like, the?"rockit scientists" ?of NY State's "Berger" Hospital Utilization committee deemed the hospital, and its desperately needed emergency room to be redundant - a bad choice. The hospital closed tonight, somone will die tomorrow because the two emergency rooms closest to our neighborhood are about 5 miles apart in one of the densest areas in America - lousy bureaucratic thinking that will cost lives...but there you are, and the Archdiocese will let the hospital become the "St. Clares," condominiums - medicine and education, the former mainstays of the church are secondary with emptying pews.? All people decisions are hard, but the closing of this hospital is very, very hard. So what does this have to do with gardening?? Well, my late wife Allegra used to take patients down to the rosebushes she tended, (cursing their thorns) during her lunchtimes, and convinced an Iraqi ward clerk to translate the garden rules into Arabic for our Yemini users and their families, and was remembered for doing this by some of the old timers whom I was taking family pictures of, in the midst of the multi-cultural Irish wake, for a beloved hospital, killed by small mindedness, greed, and short-sighted ( is there any other kind) political decisionmaking. The garden, the folks from Spellman (the?hospital wing?for folks suffering from HIV related disease) who enjoyed the place before going to their rewards in those pre-cocktail days, an unprintable true story about Mother Theresa's visit to the Prison ward, and the sheer stupidity of those with more power than compassion filled my evening.? So many stories, so much caring, the wake blocked 52nd Street between 9th & 10th avenues, the EMS guys grilling, the tears, the laughter, resignation, and the stories that will be lost once the wards become condominums. There's a great book about the heroic days of pre-cocktail HIV St. Clare's Hospital, "These Least of my Children," by Dr. David Baxter that is out of print, but well worth reading and worth googleing. There was a lady from the New Yorker there, and I'm sure her story will be more balanced and well written than mine - but she doesn't remember the folks, thinned out by the dread disease, smelling the flowers in the garden, but I do - and so do others who care, and will continue to care in other hosptials and gardens. Thinking of the diffence that caring people make in hospitals and gardens, Adam Honigman ________________________________________________________________________ Email and AIM finally together. 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