TOUCH: The seat by the radiator at the Brooklyn Inn

One winter evening not long ago, I was having a beer alone at the Brooklyn Inn before meeting a friend for dinner. As I arrived, the bartender was setting out tea lights along on the bar, and through the iron grille-work on the windows, I could see bare tree branches turning to shadows against a purple sky. I was delighted to find my favorite seat empty: at the end of the short end of the L-shaped bar, right next to the old mirrors and the radiator. I hung my coat beneath the bar, got out my book, ordered a Sixpoint Brownstone ale, and settled in.

After a few moments, a man walked in and took a seat a few stools down from me. The bartender appeared to have his drink—a Manhattan—waiting. After a few sips, he asked me what I was reading, and I told him. Then I returned to my book. The combination of quiet, a cool beer, and the warmth wafting up from the hissing radiator was what I’d come for, after all.

As I was heading out the door—my coat nicely warmed—the regular swiveled toward me. “Have a nice evening,” he said, extending his hand. I extended mine in return, and he grasped it with both of his. “Ah, your hands are so warm!” he said. Then he paused. “Let me do that again!” So I offered him my warm hand.

A month or so later, I was once again enjoying a beer and a book at the seat by the radiator on a winter evening. The same man walked in and glanced my way before the bartender presented him with his Manhattan. I wasn’t sure if he recognized me, but I gave him a small smile all the same. When I got up to leave, I thought he might wish me a nice evening or reach out to shake my hand, and found I was slightly disappointed when he didn’t. Instead, he picked up his drink and walked over to claim my stool. Apparently, even the regulars know it’s the best seat in the house. No doubt it was still warm.

SIGHT: The “Toast” of Smith Street

During my first year in New York City, I would take the F train each morning from Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn to Rockefeller Center, where I worked. If I happened to be standing near an east-facing window as the train descended from the elevated tracks at Smith–Ninth Street into the tunnel at Carroll Street, I would look up from the pages of The Fountainhead, where Howard Roark was constructing skyscrapers with egomaniacal glee, and look down at what I’ve come to think of as “the toast.”

Sand of varying shades has been bulldozed into five corrals at the edge of the Gowanus Canal. Apparently, each shove of a bulldozer creates slabs that resemble slices of bread leaning up against one another, or a loaf collapsing after being released from its wrapper. The dark brown sand might be pumpernickel; the beige, whole wheat; the grayish brown, rye.


Only later did I discover that my “toast” belonged to Quadrozzi Concrete Corporation—and that it would no doubt become part of the Roarkian skyscrapers of a city that, back then, I was only beginning to discover.

I tried to visit the Quadrozzi concrete yard in person on two occasions, and both times I was turned away “for security reasons.” Plus, I discovered that the toast doesn’t look quite as impressive from ground level. The magic, it seems, is in the view from above, when the hearty crusts of these unintentional loaves are set in relief against the stagnant Brooklyn canal and the towers of Manhattan sparkling beyond.

TOUCH: Mood Designer Fabrics

Silk charmeuse. Iridescent chiffon. China silk habotai. Poplin, corduroy, and velvet. Shangtung. Houndstooth and herringbone. Tuile. Lace. These are just some of the treasures that await on the third floor of 225 West 37th Street.

Wedged between a loading dock and a scaffolding, number 225 looks just like any other garment-district office building--were it not for the hordes of twentysomething design assistants in skinny jeans and boots crowding into the elevator and spilling out onto the third floor. They roam the narrow aisles stacked floor to ceiling with rolls of fabric, clutching scraps of paper torn from magazines, trying to match color and texture to the feathers of a bird, or the feeling of a night sky. Mood salespeople scurry between the bolts with enormous shears, lopping off samples left and right.

But for the casual visitor, Mood Designer Fabrics offers a feast for the fingers. There’s nubbly tweet and itchy netting, tufted shags and glinting sequins. Rich brocades and heavy quilting loll in one corner, while filmy chiffon and lace flutter from another. Rows of trim offer dangling pompoms, crystalline baubles, and tickling fringes. There’s a section of feathers, and one of eyelet leather and slippery vinyl, and a more sedate corner of wool suiting. Perhaps lurking between the taffeta and the seersucker is the next fabric to adorn models on Paris runways and plastic hangers in Chinatown knockoff booths.

SOUND: The bells of St. Martin’s Church, Harlem

Parishioners in Sunday hats trickled from the doors of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church onto the sidewalk of 122nd Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. As throbbing SUVs and wheezing tour buses idled at the stoplight, the air above rang with the tintinnabulation of one of only two carillons in New York City. When the tolling ceased, I glanced up at the ninety-foot bell tower and glimpsed a shadow darting beneath the bells: Michael Smith, the self-described “unofficial, unpaid Quasimodo of St. Martin’s.”

The carillon is the largest instrument known to mankind. Wires connect a “keyboard” of pedals and knobs to clappers on the bells. St. Martin's forty-two bronze bells, which were cast in 1949, comprise three and a half octaves. The smallest is the size of a flowerpot, and a man could curl up inside the largest.

In contrast to his ancient and enormous instrument, Michael Smith is an unassuming middle-aged man in khakis. I had the privilege of meeting Michael on two previous occasions, when he had invited me up to the carillon room—a pigeon-spattered box accessed by a ladder high in the church tower—to watch him play.

As I listened to the tapping of Michael’s worn penny loafers on the pedals and the rattle and creak of the wood as his fists slammed down on the batons, I felt like I was hearing the secret heartbeat of these bells whose ringing can be heard within a six-block radius of the church. Michael once described carillon playing as a “pointillistic art”: one strike of a pedal or baton creates a note that cannot be dampened, and the sounds layer and merge in an “illusion of polyphony.”

Fittingly, St. Martin’s carillon owes its existence to a civic polyphony of sorts. The instrument was built in 1939 to celebrate the resurrection of the church from a fire that almost destroyed it, and was financed entirely by donations from the working-class families of the parish. Today’s congregation, however, lacks the funds needed maintain it. The bells need to be rotated. The tower roof needs to be repaired, and the bricks are crumbling. Because their music carries so far, the bells effectively have a constituency of their own. The challenge is to convince potential donors that they are not financing a church but rather preserving a more ecumenical piece of Harlem’s history.

Michael once told me, quoting from Ovid, that one thing he loves about playing the bells is being “a voice and nothing more.” After his plinks, clangs, and clongs have faded into the Harlem afternoon, no one knows that the “sweaty-looking white guy walking back to the subway” (as Michael put it) was the reason that they had paused, if only for a moment, to look up--and wonder, and listen.