Open House New York
Oct. 20th, 2025 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Had an absolutely fabulous time in NYC.
But as soon as I crossed the bridge into Ulster County on the way back to Wallkill, I immediately reverted to feeling anxious & despairing & helpless.
So, that was interesting.
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But anyway, NYC.
Real-life Flavia & I had completely forgotten that October 18 was the day of the massive No Kings march when we signed up for Open House New York.
"Do you feel guilty about missing the protest?" I asked Flavia.
"Yes," she said. "Do you?"
"Yes," I lied.
But in fact, I did not.
The truth is I am sick of political protests. I am sick of living in a state of perpetual seige. I can't keep up the pressure that's ceaselessly being demanded of me. If one more Democratic candidate in fuckin' Oklahoma texts me If you don't send me money right now, Trump is gonna dissolve the Supreme Court!!!!! just because I once contributed $50 to Antonio Delgado, I am gonna stop voting altogether.
I don't think we're trapped in some awful Third Reich remake; I think we're living through the collapse of an empire with obvious parallels to 1st century AD Rome. Trump is as bitter & vengeful as Tiberius, but Suetonius and the possibly apocryphal pisciculi notwithstanding, there were millions of people who managed to live perfectly pleasant & reasonable lives as Caligula sodomized his sister & made his horse the Secretary of Homeland Security, thereby hastening the Republic's fall.
History's gonna do what history's gonna do. And it's very clear the great cosmodemonic pendulum is swinging into Dark Ages territory. I can't do anything about it! The center is not holding. The dark beast is struggling to be born, and I am just fuckin' tired of telling its mother, Don't push!!!!
No doubt, this is just temporary burnout, & in a couple of days I will be ready to rejoin the army of the angels.
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Flavia lives in the most gorgeous West Village apartment you can possibly imagine, right next door to Emily Ratajkowski and three doors down from Sofia Coppola. As Flavia & I left her apartment, I kept hoping the celebs would be leaving their apartments, too, so I could snap covert iPhone pix and sell them to The Daily Mail for large sums of money.
It was also the most gorgeous October day you could possibly imagine, so we walked to our first OHNY venue, which was the Players off Grammercy Park. We tromped through Washington Square Park, scene of so many high school misadventures, which I hadn't visited in years—
—and thence through Union Square, which has the most wonderful Saturday Farmers market where every conceivable seasonal vegetable & fruit is on display. Behold the artisnal tomatoes:
Grammercy Park is the only private park in New York City. You have to have a key to enter. Its high black wrought-iron gate is surrounded by beautiful upscale buildings that have either retained their 19th century facades or been artfully remodeled. Flavia regaled me with stories about her eccentric aunt who once lived there while we waited for our date with the Players. The eccentric aunt was once painted by Alice Neel!
The Players is a club founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth, the famous 19th century American stage actor.
Edwin Booth's career took a nosedive after his brother John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Edwin Booth had a bitterly contentious and competitive relationship with his brother since they were both rivals for the same pot of fame, and attention, after all, is a fiat currency. After Lincoln's assassination, he was overcome with guilt: Had his relationship with his brother somehow driven his brother to commit the murder? Abraham Lincoln's assassin was gonna be way more famous than any Hamlet!
The most poignant thing in the Players Club was Edwin Booth's open letter to the People of the United States, which he arranged to have printed in as many newspapers as possible:
The letter saved his career. He opened Booth's Theater on Twenty-third Street in 1869 and for thirteen years maintained the most popular revivals of Shakespeare's tragedies ever known in the city. One imagines part of his popularity was the frisson of terrified delight theatergoers experienced at beholding a Hamlet who'd once shared a womb with a great man's assassin.
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Fun factoid: Edwin Booth bought the mansion from Valentine Hall—the same Valentine Hall whose widow and granddaughter, Eleanor Roosevelt, I wrote about in my very first Hudson Valley supernatural Big House story.
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The Players is shabby, musty & fusty, its walls covered with not-very-good art, portraits of people who used to be famous long ago. But utterly fascinating the way all such repositories of long-ago fame are fascinating and apparently, still a hangout for moderately famous Broadway actors today. Mostly the basement bar with its billiards table.
After that, Flavia and I scampered off for a tour of the Woolworth Building lobby.
That's the Woolworth Building in my opening photograph. I've always thought it's the most beautiful skyscraper in all of New York City, and architecturally interesting, too, as explained to us in our docent tour—but I see I have exceeded my diary-scribbling time alottment for today, & so must compress the rest my fabulous weekend into expired Instagram story outtakes:
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Date: 2025-10-20 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-20 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-20 08:51 pm (UTC)Your photo of the Woolworth Building is stunning! Glad to read you had a good weekend break in the city.
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Date: 2025-10-20 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-20 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-21 11:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-21 10:22 am (UTC)Thank you. Fabulous post!
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Date: 2025-10-21 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-21 11:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-21 11:51 am (UTC)I know, right? 😀