I used to live alone in a studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the sidewalks were reminiscent of suburbia, populated by dogs, double-wide strollers, and children on Razor scooters. The Upper West Side is where once a year the colossal characters for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade lie in puddles in the streets until helium courses through them and they rise like giants. It’s where dinosaurs decorate the steps of the American Museum of Natural History at Christmastime; where street signs on 84th Street near the site of Edgar Allan Poe’s old farmhouse have twice misspelled his middle name as “Allen,” leading a magazine editor to quip that “if the ghost of Poe is wondering when posterity will learn to spell his name correctly, the answer would seem to be: nevermore.” The Upper West Side is where orbs representing stars and planets float inside the giant glass cube of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. It’s where life-size statues of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln—who stands on the sidewalk in a stovepipe hat like a ghost after dark—greet you outside the New-York Historical Society, the city’s oldest museum.
At the top of the Guggenheim rotunda, Martin’s later works called to mind children’s wallpaper, and flags I saw on boats in Montauk at the end of summer. I liked these bolder paintings best. A museum booklet explained that they were reminiscent of the paintings from Martin’s first years in New York on Coenties Slip, the street she lived on, a place I’d never heard of.
That evening, back at home, I looked it up. Coenties Slip is still there, at the southern tip of Manhattan, near the East River, on a landfill that was once a busy berth for wooden ships arriving from far-flung places. The romanticism of this bygone port of call lured me in. And so on another Tuesday, I bundled up and took the 1 train to the tip of Manhattan, where ferries depart for the Statue of Liberty and the streets date to the city’s earliest days.
The subway doors opened at the old South Ferry stop, the last on the line, where on the wall a colorful ceramic tile from the early 1900s was decorated with a sailboat. Outside, the air downtown was colder off the water; the wind stronger, lifting gulls flying in arcs around the Staten Island Ferry Terminal sign. The sun was white and faint in the sky. Men called to visitors standing around stubborn mounds of dirty snow. “Excuse me—sir, ma’am—do you need help?” they asked. “Statue of Liberty? This way.”
I hurried away from the ferry ticket sellers, passing shredded plastic bags hanging like cobwebs from bare tree branches in the Battery, and made my way toward the squat old buildings nestled in the valleys between skyscrapers. It was here that George Washington bid his troops farewell at the end of the Revolutionary War and, not too far away, that Thomas Edison’s electric plant—supplying the first Edison underground central station system in the country—began operating in 1882.
On Pearl Street, near a Le Pain Quotidien and the remnants of an eighteenth-century cistern, I saw a sign: Coenties Slip.
Melville mentions the Slip in Moby-Dick but in Redburn: His First Voyage describes it more vividly, so much so that standing on the street that winter morning, I could picture it as having been “somewhere near ranges of grim-looking warehouses, with rusty iron doors and shutters, and tiled roofs; and old anchors and chain-cable piled on the walk”; as a place where “sunburnt sea-captains” could be seen “smoking cigars, and talking about Havanna, London, and Calcutta.”
There was no sign of them now—no anchors, no talk of faraway places—only a few restaurants and an eyebrow threading salon. Across the street was Coenties Slip park, which is an ambitious name for a tiny plaza with wood benches and a bare tree guarding its perimeter. In the center was a metal and glass sculpture meant to evoke a boat balanced on its end.
There was likewise no trace of Martin or her neighbors, a who’s who of American artists: Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, Charles Hinman, Robert Indiana. They were the first community of New York artists to live in industrial spaces, according to Holland Carter, the former New York Times art critic, and rented for a song the empty brick and granite warehouses—few with heat or kitchens—abandoned by the maritime industry as it crept north in the late 1950s. “Each of the artists pursued an individual path,” Carter wrote, “treasuring independence, not only from New York School painting but from one another as well.”
Indiana rented a top-floor loft on the Slip. From his windows (which he had to install himself) he had a view of the East River, Brooklyn Heights, abandoned piers, and sycamore trees. In the morning he could watch the sun rise through the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. At night, it didn’t matter if there was moonlight—the lighthouse of the nearby seamen’s hostel shined through the skylights of his studio.
The lighthouse is now gone, and most of the lofts have been razed. I looked up what it costs to live on the street these days. A one-bedroom walk-up on 2 Coenties Slip last rented for nearly $3,000 a month.
To learn anything about the Slip while you’re actually on it requires seeking out a little brown New York Landmarks Preservation sign posted laughably high on a pole. The lettering was so small that to read it, I had to take a photo and enlarge it. The sign didn’t mention Martin or Indiana, or any artist, for that matter. It simply noted that the buildings there stand on the earliest New York landfill. What remains of Martin’s era is the work of the artists who lived there, like Andy Warhol’s film Eat (shot at Indiana’s studio) and Indiana’s 25 Coenties Slip, July 20, 1957, part of a series of drawings of the area.
The wind was unforgiving. On the other side of a wall—across FDR Drive, beyond a construction site—was the East River. For once, it was close enough. My cheeks were so cold they felt wet, and my fingers had gone numb in my gloves. I began walking away from the river and the Slip, north through the shadowed side streets of the Financial District, along the last vestiges of nineteenth-century New York. I turned left onto Fulton and was soon heading toward the monolith that is One World Trade Center and, in the foreground, the white whale ribs of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, so big they seemed to reach across the street. To my right was the steeple of St. Paul’s Chapel, dwarfed by newer buildings. As I neared the graveyard and the brownstone church, the last colonial-era church left in Manhattan, I couldn’t recall ever having set foot inside. I stopped abruptly and crossed Fulton.
It’s strange to see a group of headstones tilted amid modern commerce, bookended by a Staples and a Millennium Hilton. In New York our dead are consigned to the boroughs, so we don’t see them unless we make a point of visiting. But there, in downtown Manhattan, was an exception—a reminder of the past. And of the inevitable future. Cemeteries in places like Istanbul rest beside mosques and schools, among the living; inescapable memento mori.
St. Paul’s is a modest churchyard. There are no twisting paths, no tall sculptures creating private sanctuaries. The trees were barren, save for one holding a large bird’s nest. The grass was half covered with a layer of snow. The gravestones—thin and round-shouldered, with caps and tympanums—were the color of bark and river stones, some green with algae, some without words.
The first worshippers gathered at St. Paul’s in 1766, more than 250 ago, making it one of the city’s oldest buildings in continuous public use. I stepped up onto the west porch, passed under the lantern, and went through the double doors. George Washington (in whose boyhood notebooks you’ll find the French maxim “’tis better to be alone than in bad Company”) prayed here, when there were still orchards and grass rolling down to the river.
The heat indoors felt good after hours of walking in the wind. I tugged off my gloves, flexed my fingers. Unlike city snow, most everything in the church was a fairly pristine white. Glass chandeliers sparkled at the end of long chains. I walked the black-and-white marble tiles along the side aisles where historical photographs and renderings on display charted the chapel’s evolution.
After the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, St. Paul’s served as a relief mission for recovery workers at Ground Zer
o. Today a small room, the 9/11 Chapel of Remembrance, has glass cases with photos of firefighters, rosaries, and teddy bears—a rainbow one; one dressed as a police officer; one embroidered with “I Heart NY”—that had been given to rescue workers. I touched a pew that still bore traces of the scratches from gear and boots left by relief workers catching a few hours of sleep between shifts.
Outside, I put on my gloves and caught an express train back uptown. There, I made my way toward home, toward the Hudson River, which runs hundreds of miles down from the Adirondack Mountains, along the west side of Manhattan, to the southern tip of the city before disappearing into the Atlantic Ocean.
Sanctuaries and Strangers
Designing Home
My happiest times were
when
i was left alone in
the house on a
Saturday
—Charles Bukowski, “My Secret Life”
The first light appears over Central Park. Scarcely a sound comes through the walls or windows—not the neighbor’s baby, not a passing car, only the soft, mechanical whir of the city. I hear the belch of the heater as it wakes; feel a draft under the door. There are no lights in the windows in the tower across the way, only the tiny twinkling ones people wind around their balconies. I’m alone with the morning and the first planes gliding in.
They pass a bright dot in the sky that I think is Venus. The word “planet” is derived from an ancient Greek verb that means “to wander,” but in winter, I’m content to stay still. And in my study, that’s precisely what I do.
I wrap my hands around a cup of matcha tea as snow blows over the water towers on the rooftops. In the study, I’m offstage. I write, nap, book the next trip. I listen to Christine and the Queens; watch the sun rise and become a hot pink smear; light a candle when the sky begins to go dark in the late afternoon.
It was in the study that I watched videos of Julia Child making French onion soup and teaching the finer points of knife sharpening. In the study, I came across the Surrealist Leonora Carrington, and the journals of Edmond de Goncourt, in which he chronicles his meals and theater outings with Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, and Victor Hugo—as well as his first encounters in the studio of “a painter named Degas” and his initial impressions of the Eiffel Tower. (“One could not dream of anything more offensive to the eye of a member of the old civilizations.”) In the study, I began keeping a commonplace book with passages, poetry, and quotes from books and papers about things that intrigued me, a practice that dates to the sixteenth century. And speaking of practices, I began jotting down those that, through cities and seasons, helped make my alone time rich and meaningful: snapshotting the moment, trying new things, being present, being playful, communing with art, cultivating anticipation, finding silence, rolling with whatever comes, walking, listening, reminiscing, remembering that everything is fleeting.
Just as primitive man returned to the cave for security and secrecy, as the historian Lewis Mumford wrote, modern man returns to the study, the home office, even indoor privacy spaces with names like the Pause Pod and the Bocchi Tent (the “All-Alone” Tent, as the Tokyo-based news site SoraNews24 translated it). In House Thinking, the writer Winifred Gallagher describes primate research from the National Institutes of Health that found that when monkeys were let out of their home cages and into a playground, they periodically decided to return to their nests to check in. Even the outgoing monkeys did so. This had a calming effect: Their levels of cortisol and other measures researchers use to evaluate stress decreased.
“We too are restored by a respite in our safe base,” Gallagher said. Rooms matter. Our environments can affect how we think, feel, and behave. For instance, Judith Heerwagen, a psychologist with the United States General Services Administration, has written that a lack of control over our work environment—whether it involves lighting, temperature, ventilation, or privacy—can lead to withdrawal, negative moods, and even physical symptoms like headaches. At home, we often have more control, both physically and psychologically. Gallagher refers to this as psychological customization: creating spaces that help foster whatever mindset or behavior we wish to arouse.
Nathaniel Hawthorne called his study at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, his “sky parlor.” Dylan Thomas thought of his writing shack in Laugharne, Wales, as his “water and tree room.” Virginia Woolf famously encouraged women to get rooms of their own.
Not all “rooms” are indoors. Thoreau’s “withdrawing room” was a pine forest behind his house in the woods in Concord. Indeed, when the United States established a national wilderness preservation system with the Wilderness Act of 1964, it defined “wilderness” not just as wild land, but also land that “has outstanding opportunities for solitude.”
All kinds of people need some sort of withdrawing room: introverts, extroverts, introverts who seem like extroverts. Consider Amy Schumer, a self-described introvert who performs live in front of stadium-size crowds. When filming, she retreats to her trailer during lunchtime so she can have time to herself to meditate. During social gatherings, she takes breaks or walks by herself. When she’s on the subway, she wears headphones to create a sense of privacy. “I enjoy being alone,” she wrote in her book of personal essays, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, explaining that she was never happier than when she finally figured that out about herself.
My own study is small. When birds fly by the window, I see their reflection pass over my glass desk as if it were the sky. I wanted it to be a place for both productive work and meditation. And so it’s a kind of tabula rasa: white walls, no photos, no art. Yet here and there are traces of where I’ve been. A bookmark with gold polka dots from the Hôtel Parc Saint Séverin marks a place in the pages of some paperback and will be rediscovered months or years later. Pocket maps with points of interest circled by hotel clerks are tucked into Moleskine notebooks. A nazar hangs from a bracket in a closet, along with the white Bensimon sneakers I picked up in Paris. In the narrow breast pocket of my leather jacket is my business card with the address of the Paris hotel I stayed in while on the assignment for the New York Times written on the back.
After that trip, I would unzip the jacket pocket every now and then to tuck a MetroCard inside—and I’d rediscover the card with the Paris address. It was like fishing joy out of my pocket. And so instead of throwing it away, I slid it back in, where it waits to be found again.
* * *
On a winter afternoon at the Marlton hotel in Greenwich Village, freelancers gather in the lobby around the fireplace, under the coffered ceilings, snug on green velvet couches and upholstered chairs, tapping on laptops, nursing lattes, unhurried by the staff. Let the wind howl. There are few cozier places to be than inside this boutique hotel with patterned rugs and wood- paneled walls, a touch of Paris on 8th Street.
Much of city life, some of it rather private, doesn’t take place at home. A room of one’s own, after all, is expensive. And so at the Marlton, people settle into club chairs, log on to the free wi-fi, and conduct the day’s business, alone together.
It feels liberating to be out in the world as you work, untethered, away from the fluorescent lights of the office and the purr of idle printers. Eventually, someone will come by and ask if you want a menu. “No rush to order,” a waiter once said to me. “People always hang out.” The sandwiches are hot, the music soft and wistful: “Dark Side of the Moon” by Chris Staples, “Crucify Your Mind” by Rodriguez. The Marlton was once a single-room-occupancy hotel where the likes of Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce checked in. Strangers ask to share an outlet or your couch. You exchange a few words about the food, the weather, favorite hotels in other cities. These brief alliances feel good, like the hearth a few feet away.
One of the boons of time on our own is being able to have experiences we don’t necessarily have when we’re with friends and family—and that includes trying new things and making new connections. Maybe we’
ve decided to travel alone to Provence for a culinary course, or to Sedona for a spa weekend, or to Maui for surf camp—and in the process, we meet other travelers with similar interests and passions. These connections are part of the joy and reward of alone time. By daring to go alone, we have an opportunity to be quiet and reflective, to expand our mind and our experience—and our social network.
Indeed, for those who prefer to spend less time alone, solo travel often leads to just that because it creates opportunities to meet new people and develop friendships. This is but one reason why trying to convince a friend to accompany us on a trip he or she isn’t especially interested in, or waiting to meet a significant other before setting off to a place we’ve longed to go, isn’t necessarily a wise approach. Go alone and there’s a good chance of finding companions along the way.
Even the most fleeting connections play an important part in solo travel. Generous strangers may be a source of help and support, be it with directions, restaurant recommendations, or friendly conversation. These moments give a solo traveler a welcome dose of company (we are, after all, social beings) in between adventures.
All that being said, we have a tendency to underestimate the pleasure that can come from conversations with strangers. For instance, a field study by Gillian M. Sandstrom of the University of Essex in England, and Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, asked customers buying coffee in a busy Starbucks to either have a genuine social interaction with the barista, as they would with an acquaintance, or to make their interaction as efficient as possible, avoiding unnecessary conversation. Guess who enjoyed their coffee run more? The people who connected with the person who took their order.
A series of nine experiments by Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Juliana Schroeder, an assistant professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, found that there’s a significant difference between what we think will happen and what actually happens when we talk to strangers. For example, participants in experiments on subways and buses predicted that they would have a more positive commute if they sat alone in solitude than if they had a conversation with a stranger. But, in fact, people had more pleasant commutes when they connected with others, the researchers reported in a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
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