This morning, we set out bright and early after some coffee and tea at home to take the PATH train from Hoboken to Manhattan, and got out out after 11 minutes, in Greenwich village, walking less than five minutes to the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, at 65 W 6th St. The New School is one of these classic city schools (with a venerable history throughout the 20th century) that are scattered all over this part of town, in many different buildings. The Eugene Lang College in particular is the site the Society for Textual Studies conference this year (for about 80 of us), but also happens to be my employer, thanks to a grant, for the past two years (at anywhere from 10-20 hours a week of editorial-assistant work). So I got to “go to the office” for the first time ever, as I attended a portion of the conference to take in the keynotes on the intersection of Black studies, textual studies, and book design, and to give another paper on Chesnutt’s story “The Dumb Witness.”
But first, we wandered around a bit, because we were early, and got a bit of a flavor of the area, with its wild mix of townhomes, shops, warehouses, and tenements, with little green spaces sprinkled in between. But then it was time for me to do my conference duties, while Mark was free to wander around and headed to the banks of the Hudson, discovering all kinds of different piers, including the larger and quite new green space called “Little Island” which creates a sort of artificial cliff landscape right on the water’s edge. We met up again for lunch and ended up munching on pastry leftovers from the conference with my friend/boss/colleague and chief conference organizer, Stephanie Browner, whom we helped a bit with refreshment set-up and the other mundane “intern work” that she had to do on top of her role as conference organizer and moderator). We sat in the courtyard of the Lang School and had a really good time chatting (only partly shop talk), and after we’d procured & delivered ice for her from the nearby bodega for this evening’s reception, she went back to panel moderating and we took off to explore the neighborhood.
Mostly, we just wandered around, but the highlights were Washington Square Park with its famous arch (which I’d seen in a few paintings) and its history in literature (title of a Henry James novel, and even the setting for one of Chesnutt’s short stories). It was actually a very small green space, given this outsize history in literature and art (maybe two blocks by one?), and of course packed with people enjoying a glorious sunny day that started in the 50s and ended up in the 80s. We then walked the short distance to the Soho/”Noho” neighborhood in search of #9 Bleecker Street, where the Yippies (of the first and second “generation” of the Young Independent Party) used to have their headquarters, and where the NYC punk and New Wave scene was huge in the late 1970s / early 1980s. The famous CBGB (as in the lyrics of the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime”) used to be across the street on the Bowery, but there is now only some boring bougie shop. # 9 still features a store front that is a boxing club, originally called Overthrow, which has some memorabilia, including a funky 1986 poster advertising a “boxing match” between Warhol’s and Basquiat’s paintings. (There are some personal connections in the family to the place, which is why we went–but that’s not my story to tell.)
After that, we meandered back toward the river (partly because it was going to be cooler there, with a nice breeze) and walked leisurely along the Hudson with some breaks. Now that the air was a bit clearer, we could actually see the Statue of Liberty in the distance-although there was some sort of bad-air warning on my weather app all day.
Eventually, we turned back into the Village, walking along the Gansevoort, the main artery of what used to be the meatpacking district, then became a poorer residential neighborhood, then got VERY run-down in the 60s and 70s, and eventually was gentrified in the 1990s. We found our way to another little park (there are lots of these) and then walked to Christopher Street, and to THAT little memorial park across from the Stonewall Inn, where the famous riot happened on June 28, 1969. The entire building and the surrounding ones are being renovated, so that the place can open as a National Monument in October of 2024–which is wonderful, but meant that the photos we took are super crappy and full of construction equipment and scaffolding, even as the area is festooned with rainbow flags and many people were milling around, with a group of high schoolers getting a guided tour of the area–good to see!
Ultimately, we walked back to the Eugene Lang College building on 11th St. and 6th Ave., rested for a bit in the foyer, and joined the conference reception at 6 pm. There were lovely appetizers (as Stephanie had promised earlier) and we made a whole meal of them as we talked to people we knew (several UNL professors are at the conference) and others we had just met, like an M.A. student from Loyola working on data analysis of Emily Dickinson’s work, and a Dutch editor of a 24-volume edition of a Dutch fiction writer I had never heard of. It’s fun to talk to scholars whose fields just ever so slightly overlap with your own and hear how they approach editing! We helped clean up a little, and then took the 11-minute ride back to Hoboken. We had a lovely gelato on the way home and were home shortly after 7. “Only” barely 11 miles for me, since I sat at a conference all morning, but Mark did some extra walking and must have walked at least 13!