July 8, 2011
Friday

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else in the world.
— Don Herold, 1889-1966
American humorist

At the outset, I meant my summer in the city to have the aspects of an ordinary sight-seeing trip as well as some qualities of the writer’s residency, undertaken at a studio in the city instead of a cabin in the woods. They say Edgar Allen Poe wrote “The Raven” on Carmine Street (or maybe West 3rd) in the Village. E. E. Cummings, who had a dream of living in a “N.Y. garret,” was fresh out of college when he rented a 20-by-20 foot studio with a kitchenette on East 15th. Thomas Wolfe wrote the first draft of Look Homeward, Angel on West 11th, and may have been working on You Can’t Go Home Again on 1st Avenue when he ran down the street one night chanting “I wrote ten thousand words today!”

I’m in a well-appointed 20-by-20 foot studio in the East 90s. It has a full kitchen, air conditioning, a view of the Chrysler Building crown straight ahead and the East River a little to the left. (I do have to crane my neck for that, or go up to the sun deck on the roof. This is not a corner apartment.) It isn’t as verdant and natural a view as I had in Wyoming in 2007, nor in Georgia in 2009, nor in Vermont last fall. But the place is quiet (except for the yippy little dog in the apartment across the hall that yips whenever I go in or out), and private (I have not seen the same people twice in the elevator, although someone on this floor, possibly the yippy little dog’s owner, cooks something fragrant and spicy most evenings).

I decided to make today a writer’s residency day, just me and the page. In the morning I read in Ten Thousand Saints, the novel I mentioned last week that is set partly in New York City. I wrote for a while, some meandering stuff setting down the notes I complied on my people-watching excursions downtown. And then I decided to get out for a bit. I wanted to read “The Cousins,” a story by Charles Baxter that one of my Facebook friends and fellow Bread Loafer had started a discussion about.

The story first appeared in Tin House and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories for 2010 and in Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, a volume of Baxter material published this year. I didn’t buy BASS this year, for the first time in many years, because I had read so many of the selections in their original forms. “The Cousins,” though, was one I hadn’t.

I checked the online catalog of The New York Public Library and determined that Gryphon was held by and on the shelf at the branch on East 96th and Lexington. This is an area between Yorkville, where I am staying, and Harlem. What better gallivant for today than a visit to a neighborhood library situated in a fin de siècle building. I looked up directions on HopStop and set out.

I came up out of the subway at 96th and Lexington. I could see the flags at the library’s entrance up the block toward Park. I stepped into the small market on the corner and bought a banana and a juice drink. Then I walked over to the East 96th Street playground, let myself in by the gate where a friendly dog was tied, and sat down on a bench to enjoy my snack before undertaking several hours of library work.

Some website, not the official Central Park website, describes the 96th Street playground as “fair-sized, . . . without any true defining feature, yet it is very popular.” There were maybe a dozen children around, most of them clearly accompanied by babysitters. Some children were on the swings and the slides and the climbing bars. A few were splashing in a shallow pool with a spray.

I was part way through the banana and the drink when a park employee approached me. “Are you here with some children?” she asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Then you’ll have to leave,” she said. “You can’t be in here if you are not accompanying children.”

“What?!” I said, and those who know me will be able to hear that interrobang. I have to admit that my tone of voice probably communicated disbelief unto outrage.

“You can’t be here unless you are supervising children,” the park employee said. “You have to leave.”

I had one bite of banana and maybe a swallow of the drink left, but I stuffed what was left of the banana and my napkin into the drink bottle. When I got up, the park employee more or less escorted me to the gate, opened it for me, and latched it behind me.

On the sidewalk, I looked at the sign, which was posted at the entrance but not on the side of the gate I’d walked past. I wouldn’t have looked at anyway. It would never have occurred to me that bullet point #1 concerning what was prohibited was “Adults except in the company of children.”

When I got back from my time in the library, I informed my Facebook audience of my experience. Some New York friends quickly directed me to this post at Gothamist that told of two women who were actually cited for being in a playground without children to look after. Google the subject, and you’ll find a lot of discussion of this subject, most of it the eye-rolling kind that asks if regulations like this, and the ticketing of well-meaning snackers ignorant of the regulation, are really keeping our children safer.

I have a history of such minor, usually unintended, infractions of the law. I am probably still wanted in New Jersey for failing to pay at an unattended toll booth (I only had a $10 bill!) and the unpaid parking fine from Ocean City in 1998. And there’s the broken headstone I appropriated from the cemetery where my parents are buried. (It was being used to support a trash barrel. Margaret and Anna are better off with me.) And I was nearly cited for contempt of court in 2007 when someone observed me reading text messages on my phone (which was set to silent) and alerted the judge. (Phones have to be off, not silent. The reporting individual was obviously rooting for the other side in the trial we were both attending.)

Getting fined for being an unaccompanied adult in a playground, in a city where I don’t have a permanent address and nothing official that indicated I was allowed to use the temporary address would have made for an interesting addition to my Tales of the Gallivant, but I am kind of glad it didn’t get that complicated.

And when I left the library, I crossed the street at Park so I wouldn’t even have to walk past the playground