![]() | The East Village Tony Towle Municipal Cartography I live in nameless taupe I see to my horror from the standard map attached to the back seat of my taxi, coming back home from the airport: below the verdant green labeled Murray Hill, above the olive of Gramercy Park and east of the solid ochre of Chelsea -- as if 23rd to 34th, Fifth Ave. to the River were only an agglomeration of arteries on their way to actual neighborhoods, or to the FDR to just get out of town -- and that nobody actually lived here; but it is even worse than I thought, as I emerge from the Midtown Tunnel I see the colors more clearly: I live in a gray area, it seems, not taupe, in fact, the identical hue that has engulfed Brooklyn and Queens, as if Long Island had established a game-board bridgehead in this part of Manhattan, the invaders perhaps bivouacked at this very moment in Vincent Albano Park, on 29th and Second, where some of Clinton and Cornwallis's redcoats stopped to rest after the Battle of Long Island in the attempt to cut Washington off in September 1776 from the remainder of the Revolution. To do this they disembarked at Kip's Bay, supported by an unanswerable naval cannonade that scattered our rebel milita, down there, down the street and a couple of blocks up. And that's where I live: Kip's Bay. I'll quietly ink it in at the next light. 1997-98 Tony Towle Index |