A sure sign of spring, even on a blustery overcast day, is the annual Maple Syrup Festival at Indian Creek Nature Center. This year was the 40th such event, so we had even more reason to celebrate! I don't know how much of the metro population attends or volunteers during the course of the weekend, but it's well into the thousands, making this annual experience once that is shared around a pretty fair proportion of the community. The Maple Syrup Festival, along with Christmas, Pride and the Freedom Festival in the summer, and maybe some high school and college sports are ways we mark the year together.
Serving lines were short mid-morning Sunday
Beverages served inside
Bluegrass music
Obligatory food porn
a little early maybe? but it's 5:00 somewhere
Syrup is produced onsite (We're eating last year's crop)
The Nature Center promised "We won't run out of pancakes," but warned "We will run out of parking." It struck me as we ate in the auditorium that you and your family of whatever size could have easily found a place to sit down, but as usual cars were spread all over the property and down the roads. That shows, as if it needed showing, how huge a footprint cars require. It's the same at a Kernels game. I used to joke that it seemed like everyone at the game drove themselves to the game, then walked home and drove their other car to the game, but ha ha, no, that's how much space cars take. We need to stop taking all this for granted.
I also reflected, maybe because the day before I'd taken a group of students to the State Capitol in Des Moines, that semi-wild spaces like the Nature Center are at once a commodity (that we can sell to tourists), an amenity (that makes life in Cedar Rapids fun), and a space for nature. The Nature Center, as you can tell from their website, works really hard to make the fun educational, and nature education fun. And of course, the income generated by the Maple Syrup Festival helps pay for the year-round care they provide their property. Wild spaces are an unqualified good, though, and shouldn't require tourism to make us value them.
I'm not sure these days what Iowa values anymore--stay tuned for my annual pan-the-legislature post in about a month--but the Nature Center, in its quiet and subversively fun way, is doing great work in maintaining natural space, both for our use and for the rest of nature.
turkey vulture
forest slowly restoring itself, but still scarred from the storm in 2020
"Are you local?" asked the man at the coffee shop. "No," I said. "Do you work locally?" he asked. "No," I said, "I'm from Iowa." "Where is that?" he asked. From an array of potential responses, I chose, "Central US."
When I left for New York City on this long weekend, I knew (1) my best opportunity to immerse myself in Greenwich Village would be Monday, and (2) the weather forecast for Monday called for rain all day, so (3) I would be able to test out the urbanist maxim that walkable areas work in all kinds of weather because if your destination's close enough the weather simply doesn't matter.
6th Avenue at 9th Street
Reader, the maxim is true. (It helped that Monday was somewhere between light rain and drizzle, not the bouncing-off-the-pavement precipitation we often get in the "Central US.") Everywhere I walked in the West Village I encountered other walkers, some with children, many with dogs, as well as cyclists (mostly e-bikes). Life goes on, even in the rain, and it can go on just fine without a car if the design is supportive.
Hudson St approaching Perry St
The West Village, besides being spectacularly walkable, is spectacularly historic. Inexcusably, neither of our guidebooks mentions Jane Jacobs, who lived at 555 Hudson Street while writing her ur-urbanist classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
555 Hudson Street
Her home is now a realty office, possibly some revenge for Robert Moses, but at least it's not a Dunkin' Donuts.
plaque by the big front window
If your children are too young to appreciate Death and Life, they could start on this...
...available along with much else for all ages at the Tenement Museum, not far away on the Lower East Side, and whose side hustle may be one of the greatest bookstores I've ever been in.
The West Village is also the spiritual birthplace of gay rights.
Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street
Across Christopher Street from the Stonewall is Christopher Park...
where the gay rights movement is commemorated.
Scant blocks away is Julius'...
159 West 10th Street (Note that other than the main drags, streets are about 16 feet wide)
...where a few years before Stonewall, patrons invited reporters and police to witness their illegal imbibing, which events became known as "sipins."
Now that gays can congregate freely in bars and even receive packages by FedEx, it can be easy to remember that freedom was neither automatic nor easy.
The West Village also has considerable artistic heritage. The realtors in Jane Jacobs's house work within a 5-minute walk to folk music history...
Woody Guthrie lived at 74 Charles Street
theater...
Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street
theater history...
Playwrights Sidewalk on Christopher Street
jazz...
Village Vanguard Jazz Club, 178 7th Avenue S (2010 photo of younger humble blogger with humble son Robbie)
and film!
IFC Center, 323 6th Avenue
There is also 94 Charles Street, for hipster baseball card collectors:
And there's 25 Charles Street...
...where my friend Mark Dunn lived in the 90s while trying to make a go of playwrighting.
Farther east, Cafe Wha?...
115 MacDougal Street
...is featured on the cover of Rhino's Troubadours of the Folk Era collection.
Sitting in the coffeeshop on a "slow" Monday (free WiFi, restroom, steady entrance of customers, $4.75 for a 12 ounce drip coffee)...
787 Coffee, 208 West 10th St
...I feel comfortable and at home here. I don't even want to go back to my hotel in Midtown!
Is it amazing that all this ferment is happening in a relatively tiny geographical space? Yes, it is, but then again, no, it isn't. It's really only when people live with each other, encountering each other on a daily basis while negotiating space and difference, that such sparks fly and magic happens. When people retreat to enclaves, we get commercialized values and the politics of fear.
While I've been in New York, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has been in Iowa, and word just came that President Biden is opening more of the Arctic for oil extraction. The West Village shows us that we can live well without either one.
Jefferson Market Library and Garden, 10 Greenwich Avenue
I suppose if I did live here, and visited Iowa, I would be blown away by all the personal space available, the cheap real estate and acres of free parking--all that chafes at me now--and the free refills. The grass is always greener... Would I then be encouraged to vote for Ron DeSantis to make America Florida (or, more attainably, Iowa)?
SEE ALSO: Mike Katz and Crispin Scott, The Rock and Roll Explorer Guide to New York City (Globe Pequot, 2018)
Scott Adams's long-running comic strip Dilbert has disappeared from newspapers this month, following a series of his online comments that were well across the line of acceptable discourse. I've read plenty of commentary since then, quoting long-time associates wondering what happened to him over the years that brought him to this pass. I wonder, too.
I've been a fan of Dilbert since the early 90s. He portrayed with brilliance and dark-but-gentle humor what
workplaces can turn us into, with all its pressure and frustration and
supervision and sometimes even fear. The tech office where he set the strip seemed familiar to me, even though my career is in a very different field, and I've never worked in a cubicle. He understood us. In the first strip I clipped from the Chicago Tribune back in 1992, Dilbert shouts "Yes!" practicing, he says, in case anything good happens to him. When he adds a dance move, he falls out of the window.
Everyone was the butt of the joke at one point or other, but the authority figures got most of it. Adams was punching up.
Like J.K. Rowling, Adams has been justly celebrated for his exceptional body of work (including a Pulitzer Prize in 1998). Also like Rowling, he's been justly condemned for a series of recent comments, mostly about race for Adams, which have nothing to do with that body of work. And were quite plainly punching down instead of up.
I wonder if all the praise went to their heads, and they fancied themselves experts on everything. Or maybe they weren't ready for the attention their random thoughts got?
Our common life benefits from artistic excellence. And it benefits from freedom of speech. But we maintain community by remembering, as Paul wrote, that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). A common life also requires listening--reading Adams's comments makes me wonder if he ever has talked with a black American--and humility before we speak. That must be especially hard to remember when people are lionized. I can see why the ancient Greeks used to banish people who got too famous!
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