#12 On a Seaport diet

South Street Seaport (a little FiDi, Fulton?) 20.08.24

I made it my mission to not pay directly for ANY housing this summer. This is the second last stop on that journey. It went like this: Bologna, Hackney, Cambridge, Lincolnshire, Gerrard’s Cross, Cambridge, Bologna, Parma, Bologna, Rome, Lincolnshire, Holloway Road, Sloane Sq., Kensington BK, Upper West Side, South Street Seaport. If I find the time and energy, I will write about each of these places, so keep an eye out.

In South Street Seaport I live on Water Street almost right under the Brooklyn Bridge. According to the New York Times’ Extremely Detailed Map of New York Neighbourhoods, my block is considered 65% Financial District, 20% Fulton/Seaport, 10% South Street Seaport, and 4% Lower Manhattan. I call it South Street Seaport because the couple I’m housesitting for call it South Street Seaport, and my morning dog walk and maybe every other walk seems to take me to South Street and what used to be the seaport. It is now Pier 17, with its gourmet market and Jean-Georges restaurant and viewing platform. In March of 2020, I came to New York for a Model United Nations conference and the NYC tour took us to this Pier 17 to take pictures.

The encroaching influence of the Financial District is palpable. Things are expensive and people look like they moved to the city recently to do well-paying post-graduate finance and consulting gigs. Most people are relatively young, but not young like me. Most women are wearing Aritzia or Reformation or some other kind of athleisure or white dresses with flowers. Most men wear navy or, for summer, a dusty blue polo, but generally underdressed and in shorts. This is, of course, not actually where they work but where they meet their Tinder dates and take happy hour and mill around. I have seen a far larger proportion than I’m used to of women posing for photos with actual camerapeople and social media brand managers. I have seen a far larger proportion than I’m used to of men smoking cigars?

There is obviously a large population of tourists, too, who come to see the view, to see the Seaport museum, and to take the ferries. I hear a diverse range of English regional accents. We are also not far from a helicopter landing pad that juts out on a pier, and I spend a lot of time staring at them landing and trying to guess what kind of people are getting on and off and where they’re coming from and going to.

The neighbourhood feels new, shiny, dusty blue, and out of place. The businesses are strange. Boutiques, non-divey dive bars, a boxing gym called “Hit the Deck” where one of their workouts is to run around the block wearing boxing gloves (peak efficiency, these men look exactly like you’d expect), and an outdoor bar on the high street promoted by Chase Sapphire Reserve®. The outdoor bar is connected to this very very strange spot called the Lawn Club, where people who have recently moved from the picket fence, cropped lawn, and country club life of the Midwest can approximate their memories on astroturf at “New York’s Leisure Headquarters.” On the street but separated by a faux box fence or inside in the ample space of the Fulton Market building, you can play “lawn pong” (an upscaled version of beer pong with bins and beach balls), bocce, cornhole, croquet, shuffleboard, ladders, a frisbee game, a fusion of golf and pool called “putting pool.” And you can do all of this with a can of CBD infused sparkling water. The staff wear forest green uniform coveralls and they stand around and watch as my dog, Sherlock, pees on the corner of the box fence.

The Lawn Club, images from their website

I live above a steakhouse and I have a hard time differentiating between the patrons sitting outside. I don’t want to make prolonged eye contact with them because it is always a medium to large group of men, the type who go to a steakhouse, and I have this sense that they’re always trying to catch my eye and give me a little smirk. My conclusion is it might be the same guys every time, maybe they work there and they’re just having perpetual family meal or they’re close neighbours who like to drink red wine and eat steak every night. In that case, I guess they’re trying to make neighbourly connections and they’re allowed to give me a little smirk. I promise I am not trying to make them into caricatures but they do often smoke cigars with their steaks.

My most frequented business is the McNally Jackson Cafe, which I’ve been to almost every morning I’ve been living here. When I mention that I live in this neighbourhood to New Yorkers, more than half of them have no idea what I’m talking about and the other proportion say that they’ve been to and love this McNally and its cafe. I am served by bisexual baristas who have relatively loud gossipy conversations and play acoustic guitar songs I recognise from summer camp. I am a poser because I come here to drink coffee and work on my laptop but I’ve never opened any of the books in this bookstore. This place fits in weirdly to my conception of the neighbourhood, it is a place with a certain amount of “culture,” which the rest of Seaport seems to be approximating but not quite getting to. (That sounds so fucking pretentious.) But it is also a chain, a place that sells self-help and autofiction and business advice books in neon colourways, and cold brew, a business with navy floors and exposed brick and dark washed wood that is trying to approximate something, and a business that takes Chase Sapphire Reserve®.

There is also Fishmarket, a dive bar that seems to be getting closer to an authentic experience. It is run by a mother and her two sons, which is not a gimmick because I hear one brother tell the other “mom wants me to do [whatever].” They don’t have a door handle, you have to grab the door by the top of the frame and engage your core to open it. On the back of their food menu they have “mama’s menu” with an array of delicious Malaysian food—Satay, Randang, curry, etc. After you’ve been sitting there for long enough, one of the brothers comes over and pours you a shot of Jameson and takes it with you, even if it’s 2:30pm. But I found this place because it was featured in an Instagram Reel made by the Infatuation, an Instagram Reel that was watched by and then inspired the kinds of South Street Seaporters who I’ve been lambasting as unoriginal and uncultured. So, yeah, I’m in it too.

The architecture around here is random. There are the hyper-modern glass and exposed iron of the newly built radical chic spots like the Tin Building and the Fulton Market Building. But this is technically one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Manhattan, and some of its history and some of its buildings are from 18^th and 19^th century. The apartment I’m living in is a different story.

I am housesitting/dogsitting for a couple who are writers and academics. The husband is from Ireland and the wife is a self-described anglophile (not sure if there is a parallel world for Irish-philia, but the period we’re dealing with is pre-Anglo-Irish Treaty so perhaps this is redundant). Their apartment has a pretty cohesive design philosophy: English/Irish country house meets a little bit of pre-1910 New York. Most lights in the loft are exposed filament bulbs which get hot. Their bathtub is from the turn of the 20^th century. Copper pots and pans. Tarnished silver cutlery. Portraits of wiggèd fellows and several paintings including cows. Beautiful hand-embroidered kitchen towels and sheets with holes and stains. Uranium glass. Even their (my, for a time) dog is kind of old worldy, he’s very thin and lanky with sad eyes.

Zachary asks me if I ever get spooked by the interior decoration, if when I’m home alone and I’m looking at the filament-lit portraits I worry there are ghosts or other entities. The truth is, I grew up surrounded by architecture and objects that are older than most of the stuff here and certainly older than South Street Seaport—I know my house has given some people the heebie-jeebies. I have also been housesitting for this couple since freshman year, when they used to live closer to campus, and am accustomed to their home’s eccentricities. In that year, when I was new to New York (and America) and scrambling to understand how the city & country worked and how I fit into it, I found it very comforting not just to be surrounded by a familiar aesthetic but to have space for myself, have a kitchen, a dishwasher, laundry, a bathtub, and a TV, and feel a little human (at the time I was living in a freshman dorm with a roommate, shared bathrooms, and no access to a kitchen). I got a lot of good essay writing and work done in that apartment, and this time is no different: last week I did an 11-hour (with breaks for dog walks) writing session and banged out a pretty good paper on 19^th-century New York, and I was in perfect harmony with my surroundings.

Essentially, I am very grateful for this apartment (and this couple’s previous one). I am also very grateful for this neighbourhood. I am writing about how weird I find it and mocking it a little, but I am so happy here that I have spent almost a week without going very far from my homebase. I like to walk along the East River Greenway and look out on the river. I like the cappuccinos at McNally and the Jameson and scallion pancakes at Fish Market. I like the bread they sell in the Tin Building and I like walking around and looking at their other gourmet wares (pink grapefruit infused vinegar, beautiful meats, jarred truffle carpaccio, glistening produce) and then smiling to myself when I check the price and then walking away. I like walking by the Lawn Club and making up stories about it in my head. I did once drink from the uranium glass, and I liked it, but I know I shouldn’t make that a habit. I like being able to get to Wall Street in about a 10-minute walk but choosing not to.

After seeing a movie at Metrograph then having a drink at Time Again (my fault), I am swiftly reminded that cheugy Seaport is worlds away from hyper radical chic LES. I feel a lot less insecure in Seaport.