Plunging Into Winter

My Swim with the Coney Island Polar Bear Club

Bonnie Tsui in Why We Swim writes that, “Swimming is, by our human definition, a constant state of not drowning.” In New York City, there doesn’t seem to be a better metaphor for day to day life, but for every swimmer — and New Yorker alike — even though the day to day is keeping afloat, there is much more to swimming than surviving. 

“Absolute intensity and immediacy,” is how Dennis Thomas describes plunging into the winter Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island. Dennis, a tall lanky man with a gentle persona, is the president of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club. Founded in 1903 by health advocate Bernarr McFadden, the Coney Island Polar Bears are the oldest cold-water swimming club in the United States. McFadden, like many at the time, believed that swimming in cold water had a number of health benefits. In fact, the ‘water-cure’ has come in and out of vogue for centuries.  

In 1853, Russell Thacher Trall founded an entire medical school dedicated to water therapy in New York City. The New York Hydropathic and Physiological School practiced what is known as hydropathy or the water-cure. The school taught the power of submerging in water — both hot and cold— to cure pain relief, nosebleeds, fever, infections, tuberculosis, salivary flow problems, and even neurological disorders. In the 1850s, hydropathy was a popular alternative medicine, and about 200 of these hospitals opened around the United States. Trall published a book in 1851 called The Hydropathic Encyclopaedia: A System of Hydropathy and Hygiene, an eight volume series dedicated to the water-cure. Swimming was highlighted as a critical part of the medical practice:

For the large class of invalids who are consumptive from feeble lungs and contracted chest, and for a still larger class of dyspeptics who are costive from torpid or contracted abdominal muscles, there is not better exercise than that of swimming. All persons, too, whether invalid or not, ought to know how to swim, on prudential considerations.

 Today, swimming is still recognized by most health practitioners as an ideal way to stay fit because of its low impact and high reward ratio and cold water once again is becoming increasingly popular now amongst the alternative medicine communities. Rebecca Mead, in a recent New Yorker piece, “The Subversive Joy of Cold-Water Swimming”, highlights the recent trend of cold and wild water swimming, saying that more and more people are claiming that swimming in cold water can boost the immune system as well as improve general mental health. Just this month, Cambridge researchers announced that cold water swimming could even produce a protein in the blood that could protect the brain from degenerative diseases like dementia.

 Dennis tells me that even though he hasn’t seen any scientific evidence to the health benefits of cold-water swimming, he has not had a winter cold since joining the club in the 70s. But his plunge into the ocean every Sunday in the winter months is less about the physical health benefits and more about what it does for his mind. Dennis says, “in New York, I think people carry a lot of stress, they worry about jobs and relationships and the subway is late, and all that but when you go into this water, you cannot think about those things, everything goes away because you are so absorbed in the intensity of this moment of just you being there in this very cold water.” Dennis tells me that a lot of the members hated winters in New York until they joined the Polar Bear Club; he says it was their way of dealing with the cold city, and now they can’t wait for winter. For Dennis and the other members, it is not about just surviving through the New York City winters anymore, but instead fully embracing them.

 I joined the Polar Bears for one of their winter plunges on a sunny but cold morning in February this year. Steve, a large and jolly man in his 50s greeted me with a “this looks like a swimmer” as I approached the meeting spot on the promenade outside the New York Aquarium. Steve had the dad-bod look — large and round-bellied but tall enough to carry it comfortably. A dry-erase board told me that the water was 40º F while next to the air temperature it said: too warm. ‘We prefer snow,’ a short round woman with gray hair and perfectly round glasses to match said as she read the same note next to me. She was already in her bathing suit and a white shower robe, I was in two sweaters, a pair of leggings, a pair of jeans, a beanie, two pairs of socks and a ski jacket, with my bathing suit underneath it all. I was nervous, but happy to be outside in the sun, with the salty ocean in front of me, while Roger Mill’s King of the Road blared out of a speaker from a bicycle that was parked on the promenade. 

 A happy crowd of about 50 people gathered by the Aquarium. Dennis had told me in an earlier interview that the club was a lot more diverse now than the old days. It used to be exclusively men but now women make up about 40 percent of the membership. I could still see the remnants of the old membership — men who looked like Steve with names to match — Tony, Willy, Mike — came up to me with stories of the old days. “We once had to shovel a path through the snow to get to the water to swim, there were only 12 of us back then,” Willy told me. Tony advised that I take off my spectacles before going into the water, as they once had a friend whose lenses popped right out when an unexpected wave hit them during a plunge.

 There were as many women — young and old — on the boardwalk now as men but they were not as quick to give me unsolicited advice. Cindy— a swimmer who had decided to plunge wearing a silver glittered knee-high boots — did however tell me to start taking off my layers before heading down to the beach so my body could get used to the cold before we went into the water. Although many of the members had added some flair to their swimming outfits — a monkey mask, a gold crown, a judge’s robe — everyone swims in bathing suits, anything thicker like a wetsuit would defeat the purpose.

 We finally stripped down to our bathing suits and made our descent to the beach. Although I had only met these people half an hour before, running down to the beach from the promenade — one big group of flesh — made me feel like I was part of their community. Maybe it was the fact that we all ran down to the beach together bellowing a ‘hoo-hoo’ warrior chant while a man blew into a conch shell. It could also be that as we did this, boardwalk civilians stopped to watch in amazement, them being the outsiders while I was part of the swimmers, the ‘in-crowd.’ Mostly, it was thrilling being part of a big group, in a city where I so often find myself acting as an individual.

 Once on the beach, Dennis told me that it is customary to make a big circle to do some quick — likely useless — stretches and then repeat the Polar Bear Chant that can apparently change weekly: When I became a Polar Bear . . . I had a full head of hair or Shrinkage comes and shrinkage goes . . . Monday morning no one knows, and more recently:  I hope everyone stays well . . . corona virus go to hell. Everyone knew it was my first time taking the icy dip, Mike came up to me to make sure I knew that while entering the water my body should be relaxed because if it was tense, I would feel the cold more intensely. Although skeptical I nodded while pretending to relax my already cold limbs. Steve said that it was important to keep my body directly facing the sun as I walked into the water. So imitating Steve, I walked — body slightly facing the right — into the water.

 Every section of my body that touched water immediately went numb so that I couldn’t feel the cold. The top half of my body — as if it knew it would soon be in the cold water — soaked up the sun above us. A gentle-looking lady approached me flapping her arms above the water, she told me to keep my elbows and hands out the water, jump, and shout the warrior chant to stay warm  — hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, she demonstrated. 

 Once everyone was waist-deep in the wave-less water, the group took each other’s hands to make another circle. If you last up until the 10-minute mark, you form yet another circle. I — a little smug that I had made it this long my first go — joined them in holding hands. After the 10-minute mark, everyone around me started finding partners to hold hands with and dunk together. Before there was enough time for me to feel awkward about not having a partner, a woman with a gold crown resting on her jet-black hair took my hand and asked if I would like to dunk with her. We went under the water together and that is when I felt it — the numbness fade and the cold set in. I came up breathless, but with a strong desire to dunk again, which I did twice more. After the third time, my head was banging, and every part of my body was stinging and awake. The pain was like stretching a tight muscle, incredibly painful but at the same time such a relief, dunking in the water felt like a muscle stretch for my skin.

 Everyone makes yet another circle at the 15-minute mark but at 14 minutes the cold overpowered my determination to stay in the water, and I had to get out. By then I was uncontrollably chattering and my skin felt slightly burnt. I probably would have risked staying in if the same lady who taught me how to jump up and down at first had not looked at my face and immediately said “you need to get out sweetie.” She clearly saw on my face what I felt in my body.

 Once everyone was out the water, still in bathing suits, we gravitated to the Aquarium wall filled with murals, “find a spot on the wall with dark paint” Steve told me, “those are the warmest spots.” And so in a long line, our wet skin stuck to the walls as we all soaked up the little bit of heat before getting back into dry clothes.

 Manoeuvring my bathing suit off and my many layers back on under my towel felt like an impossible task. Cold to the bone, my body and even my thoughts moved at a glacial pace — I repeated in my mind what Dennis had told me previously, “no-one has ever died from a Polar Bear plunge.” Once I had finally finished getting my clothes on, Mike gave me a cup of tea from a big urn they had set up and told me I was welcome back anytime as his guest. I felt my body start to thaw. Everyone was slowly disappearing back to their individual lives and so I left feeling energized and content but also believing I may never be properly warm again.

 Before this day, Dennis told me that each swim is the same, “they almost never vary, it’s you, it’s water, it’s cold.” The morning with the club felt in so many ways ritualistic. The swim — the belief and why everyone was gathered that morning — was framed with all these other traditions, the chanting, the circles, the wall. Like many belief systems, a community and weekly observance has been built around this simple idea of The Swim.

At a Crossroads

Myrtle, Central & DeKalb is Bushwick’s then, now and will be

At 5 a.m. on a small corner of a famous city unceasingly buzzing with activity, all is quiet except for the sound of a closing door, and the occasional train overhead. By streetlight, you can see an intimation of a man dressed in black with a head of thick black hair. He locks the doors of the Bushwick Public House, the bar that sits on the corner of Myrtle and Central Avenue. He walks around a corner and out of sight. There is silence but only for a moment.

At this intersection there are two mornings and they nearly touch each other. As the street empties of people finished with their last drinks a new set of morning goers takes over. The eastern horizon slowly turns a shade of green and a few people pass the intersection, some only briefly, urged forward by the train they hear coming. Others have time for a cup of coffee and a walking meal. It is 6 a.m. and there are two options for coffee, the Sunrise Deli and OMG Pizza, directly opposite each other on Myrtle Avenue.   

Traffic begins to busy the intersection with sounds. Two yellow school buses hum as they wait for the traffic light to turn green while a third school bus passes across them. Every five minutes or so, at a lull in the traffic, a different kind of humming can be heard from starlings ­–maybe a hundred of them – perched on the unused station house above.

Eventually, a small man passes, pushing a shopping cart as tall as himself over the designated crossways. He walks over the road between DeKalb and Central Avenue, then over DeKalb and Myrtle and once more over Myrtle and Central to land right under the Central M Station stairway. At this time of the morning, he may be the only one not jaywalking diagonally across the roads. With a striped red umbrella and two large orange plastic coffee containers, and some cups, he becomes the third coffee option on the intersection. The air is icy, the coffee vendor huddles his neck into his puffed jacket and keeps his hands deep in his pockets as he stands waiting for customers. 

At 7 a.m., people walking in pairs—more specifically mother and child pairs—replace the solo walkers. A mother chases her child who is whizzing down Myrtle on a scooter. Elsewhere, a little boy with a bag so big that it looks as if he may topple forward holds his mother’s hand as they cross the road. These pairs use the crosswalks diligently. A mother and daughter run to catch the B38 Bus that is easing back into the traffic, they miss it. Nearby is parked a dark green Chrysler; from the back of it you can hear a woman’s voice greeting the displeased pair with a friendly “hello sweetie.”

At about 7:10 a.m., a Manhattan-bound train approaches on the elevated track, boasting a big M on the front of it. It passes the unused station house and a black cloud of birds flies off it into the grey sky. It is at this moment that you realize you have not heard the birds in a while; there are no longer the small lulls of silence. It is rush hour at the intersection.

 At 7:30 a.m. on the dot the crossing guard jumps out the back of the parked Chrysler throws away the empty coffee cup from the Sunrise Deli and eases her way into the middle of the intersection. She blows her whistle three times and takes a position in the middle of it all; her rush-hour show has begun. It is clear that she is a neighborhood favorite. She immediately gives a lady on the sidewalk a big hug and walks her personally across the street. By the time she is back in the middle of her intersection she spots a white car and goes over to speak to the driver she knows. When a B38 bus drives by she waves hello to the driver and all the while she is singing, and making sure – with a loud blow of her whistle and a ‘let’s go sweetie’ in a tone that implies only absolute care – that her crossing pedestrians are getting to the other sidewalk safely. No one dares to cut through the middle of the intersection now.

The traffic guard stands in the middle of a six-way intersection where Myrtle, Central and DeKalb Avenue meet under an elevated railway and over storage houses, music venues, and lines and lines of electrical cords and pipes. People will tell you that this space is in transition; this is true for the whole of Bushwick in which it resides. Since Peter Stuyvesant charted it in 1661, Bushwick’s main theme has been transition. Michael Sheehan, an old MTA driver, will tell you how dangerous it became in the late 1970s, while William Jetter, the barber, will tell you about the business boom in the early 2000s, and Raul Valencia, a bartender, will speak about the shift in his clientele from students to young professionals over the past three years.

The first train stopped over Myrtle Avenue at its new station, named Central, on December 19, 1889. The elevated station had platforms covered with beige canopies framed in a metal, which was painted a rich green. The noise of the north and southbound trains rattling overhead has been a constant part of the crossway’s ambiance ever since.

Now every five or so minutes the rattling M train will interrupt the conversations of smokers standing in front of the huge window of the Bushwick Public House. Directly opposite, the train will stop the chatter of people eating falafels on the benches outside OMG Pizza, coincidently located in the bottom of a building that closely resembles the shape of a pizza slice. You won’t hear the voices of the two old women crossing the street, or the singing traffic cop

guiding them over. And just for a moment, the train passing the tracks overhead will drown out the bachata music that seeps out the blue-lit restaurant called Caribe and the bass notes thumping out of a parked car.

But on Saturday the 23rd of March 2019, the M train does not run, and there is a deafening silence. This will happen every second weekend this year while they repair the tracks. It is 10 a.m. and the streets are not busy. Instead, we hear new sounds. The Sunrise Deli has the sounds of sizzling meat, a knife hitting a board three or four times a second, a paper packet being folded, a shout from Abdul to Nicholas at the counter as a sandwich in white paper is flung in the air, and caught, a sudden jangling of coins, the words “next, yes.”

Back outside the sounds of a heavy metal door being pulled up announce the opening of the Little Shop of Soil, the brand-new boutique plant shop across the road. The intersection has many of these little stores opening amongst its older businesses. The Bushwick Public House opened in 2015, while across the road on Myrtle Avenue, Fly Guyz Barbershop opened 18 months ago, and Little Shop of Soil, has only been open for a month and a half. This is reminiscent of the business boom in Bushwick in the 1800s before the neighborhood was burnt to the ground in the 1977 riots that followed the great New York City blackout. Mike who moved out of Bushwick more than 30 years ago remembers driving the MTA 7 bus through these areas, “you would go past east Brooklyn and the entire street was leveled, there wasn’t a building in the block.” 

***

On an April afternoon – 2 p.m. on Monday the 25th – the intersection is all about business. As you descend the stairs of the Central M station, a black chalkboard on an A-frame propped up on wheels advertises a room for rent, $1700 per month. The next day it has gone down to $1680. If you hang around until around 7 p.m., you will see a man wheel away the sign down Central Avenue, eventually turning on to Harman Street. As he does, another man is handing out flyers to a comedy show down the road. He stands outside the Fine Fare Market, a grocery store on the intersection next to six dispenser machines that promise transparent plastic balls filled with different things. 75, 50 or 25 cents will get you toys, stickers or bouncy balls made wondrous by their packaging.  

And among the intersections’ colors are the murals that overwhelm the sidewalks of Bushwick. Standing in the Bushwick Public House – looking out onto the intersection through the huge window – murals surround you. The entire belly of the pub is covered in mermaids, stern faces, jungle foliage, and fish scales. Two more murals face you on the other side of Myrtle Avenue. One has two eyes, each with their own pair of long legs and feet in sneakers looking at each other with the caption “eye to eye.” The second is the face of a serious-looking child, eyes painted to look up at the overhead train, ears trickling water droplets. To the left of these and towards DeKalb Avenue, three lime green pallets on metal door grates are ready to be painted but remain blank for now. The green walls belong to the flower shop; the entrance is on the other side facing DeKalb. Next to it, a wall fashions a mural of a lady with a red flower for a head, wearing green overalls. If we cross the road to OMG pizza, its pizza-shaped wall boasts a giant anthropomorphic pizza monster. It is grotesque enough to make you stare, but one may slowly start to appreciate the wormy-looking pizza man depicted on the wall, in a suit, holding a cigarette.

***

To some nervous locals, the murals serve as a barometer indicating the neighborhood’s next transition. For an area constantly going through change it is hard to determine what it means to be local. In the 1980s ­– as Mike drove through Bushwick – he watched neighborhoods change in front of his eyes, and yet he would drive past little pockets of areas where communities survived despite influxes and outflows. William Jetter, the self-proclaimed “Brooklyn Baby,” registers demographic change just by seeing who lands up in his barber chair, noticing that in the last five years, more people have moved into the neighborhood than locals who have stayed. Growing up, William struggled to find a barber in Bushwick who could cut his hair. That wouldn’t be a problem now.

The Bushwick Public House is less likely to be considered a local on the intersection, and yet before you could find a barbershop in Bushwick, you would come across bars strewn across sidewalks. In1869, there were so many German breweries here that the 14-block neighborhood became known as “Breweries Row” until the early 90s, when Prohibition caused most of the breweries to close. Raul questions the idea of what it means to be a local in Bushwick, “I don’t know how you qualify it, like are they local because you own a house in the neighborhood or because they are renting a place in the neighborhood, or local because they happen to here for one or two years.” Locality is complicated in a neighborhood overwhelmed with ephemeral moments of history.

On an early spring Friday evening, the intersection is magic. It is 7 p.m. and deep orange sunlight bleeds through the overhead tracks, creating dramatic shadows on the sidewalk and road. Between the tracks and the ground, a buzz of energy slowly builds. Relieved crowds of people disembark their trains, descending stairs to the street below leaving their week in the city. People are more likely to stop now at the intersection, maybe to pop into the Fine Fare Market to pick up some groceries for dinner. Sometimes they will wait, as the cashiers call up to a window by the roof prompting a man to throw a small bucket – attached to a string and filled with money –to the cashier who takes the money and transfers it to the register before the bucket is yanked back up towards the window.

People seeking food, drinks, or sometimes just a place to stop and talk open the doors of the businesses exposing the intersection to the music in pulsations of volume and pace. Through the doors of Fly Guyz Barbershop, Fall by Nigerian singer Davido is playing, three men are sitting on a very large white futon positioned in the middle of the small barbershop. Two barbers meticulously work on their clients’ hair and beards, spending a great deal of time washing, cutting and styling. The men waiting do not seem to be in a rush, the barber is open until 10 p.m. and they sit casually, enthusiastically speaking about this weekend’s big gig. If William the owner is running very late, he isn’t shy to send his clients to the Bushwick Public House across the road for a beer while they wait. The slathering of Lucky Tiger message oil from a large white tub is the sign that the appointment is nearly done.

***

Back on the street, the intersection gets dark quickly, and soon the harsher light from cars and LED signs promising cold beer, coffee and ATMs replace the soft dappled sky light shining through the tracks. Some businesses like the Sunrise Deli still use the iconic neon signs, bringing to the intersection a nostalgia of the 70s in New York. Before neon lights, early in the 20th century, the intersection flickered with the earliest electric streetlights. And during an even earlier time evening would be marked by the arrival of the lamplighters carrying long poles with wicks. At dusk, they would walk along the sidewalks, lighting each street lamp.

The thought of this reminds us that as drastically and quickly as the intersection changes character throughout the day, it will change over the years. A new residential development that recently went up a few blocks down from the intersection is expected to bring 250,000 new people to the neighborhood, and the intersection will have to adapt. The latest addition to the crossway – only four days old – is the Citi Bike rack, installed at the corner of Central and DeKalb Avenue. “That’s just the nature of things,” Raul says, standing behind the bar he has stood behind for two and a half years. “You try avoid the change for as long as you can but ultimately things change. So do neighborhoods.”

***

When it gets too dark, people retreat from the streets into the warm light of buildings. It is 10 p.m. and music thumps in the Bushwick Public House. When inside, it is too loud to hear the train overhead. Instead, you feel it as it rattles along the tracks. The train is more intrusive when dark. Momentarily, it will light up the entire 6-way intersection. From a high chair by the window of the pub you can watch the train by its reflection that moves over four slim windows, across the road above Fly Guyz Barbershop. These windows are otherwise dark, their inhabitants either asleep or out. 

If you stick around for long enough, you could witness a duel, not by drunken patrons or aggressive New Yorkers. Bushwick – as Mike describes it – is not like it was in the 70s when at night one would have to keep an eye behind their back in case of trouble. On the sidewalk tonight, two men find themselves in the midst of a sword fight.

Earlier that evening, Shmuel Chayempour walked into the Bushwick Public House. He is a stocky man with a thick black beard, wearing a white shirt. Knotted fringes – known as tzitzit – come out of his black suit pants, and a small round kippah balances on the crown of his head. Coming from a religious Jewish family, Shmuel is used to people staring at him for the way he dresses but these days in bars at night they stare because of the two large black swords that hang by his waist. If you went up to Shmuel in the busy pub to question him about his swords, he wouldn’t say much, instead he would hand you one and tell you to come outside.

The door of the Bushwick Public House opens; it lets the sounds of the pub onto the street before shutting behind Shmuel and an intrigued man now with a sword in hand. The street again is quiet bar the voices from smokers, and a car passing every few minutes. The men start to fight, and suddenly the sounds of the heavy swords making contact echo throughout the intersection. The aim is to hit the bicep, chest or side stomach, while at the same time making sure you don’t get hit, the score slowly crawls towards six, the typical end goal.

Three jazzy looking old timers open the door of the pub again filling the sidewalk with music. They are wheeling large bags of instruments to a parked car nearby. Their gig in the basement of the Bushwick Public House has just ended. They move carefully around the sword fighters not especially surprised or perturbed because they – like our sword fighter – are regulars. Finally, Shmuel strikes the bicep of his opponent, marking his final victory. The duelers shake hands, a train clatters past and lights up the sidewalk like a theater at the end of a performance. After a spar with Shmuel, you would understand why every Saturday he brings his swords out. To duel outside a pub late at night is invigorating. The sword fight may be remembered tonight by the intersections’ night goers but won’t be known to the coffee vendors and the morning rush of school children and mothers.

At 4 a.m. a voice – most likely Raul or another bartender on the late night shift – will shout, “last call.” The sounds of smacking swords will stop, excited voices will dissipate and the music will die down until the only sound that can be heard is the locking of a door and the quiet steps of a bartender. Then maybe silence … but only for a moment.  

The author battles Shmuel

The Algonquin Chief Cat Officer: Alice de Almeida

In 1932, my forebear Billy wandered into the enchanting lobby of a hotel best known for hosting notable writers, journalists and actors at its famous round table. Although owner and hotel manager, Frank Case, knew that Billy had no literary reputation or journalistic experience to speak of, he let him reside at the Algonquin. From this moment, a tradition was born, and there has been one of our kind in residence ever since.

In 2019, I sit in an office upstairs at that same hotel on a huge black chair that has a tendency to move around a little on its wheels, especially when I am feeling jumpy. I press send on my one-word email that reads “CATsolutely”, confirming an interview I have later with a journalist. I stare at the giant framed painting of a silver ragdoll cat above the desk, thinking of my own portrait downstairs that has been painted in a similar style. I hope mine doesn’t make me look as fat. The thought is quickly interrupted by the sound of an email coming through with the eager response:

Puurrfect! See you later.

God, I hate journalists, but she gets the bit. To be honest, I am not sure how I feel about these cute cat puns – like catabulous and FURiend – but this is not up to me and while I am being honest I didn’t even send that ‘CATabulous’ email myself because even though I am a very famous cat, I have my limitations. Let’s take this email business for example; my lack of thumbs makes it hard for me to press that dreaded space bar. And so for this and a whole lot else, I have Alice de Almeida. My rescuer, feeder, PR manager and The Algonquin’s official Chief Cat Officer. So even though it is Valentine’s Day and I have cards to respond to and an Instagram story to update, I have agreed to sit down with Savannah, a journalist who is working on a profile on Alice. I was surprised by the request. Usually, journalists visit the hotel to get a chance to sit where their heroes did, at the Algonquin’s famous round table where journalists and writers such as Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Edna Ferber, and Alexander Woollcott met for lunch everyday in the early 20s. And if not for this, they come to write about me, The Algonquin’s world-famous cat. You see ‘Street cat against all odds makes it in the big city’ has a better ring to it than ‘That person who looks after the cat’. But Savannah wanted the latter story and so I decided to oblige because Alice is good to me.

She has been looking after me since I arrived here, a shabby orange tabby from the Long Island streets. Originally Alice came to the Algonquin as an Administrative Assistant. She was a couple days into the job when the general manager, and Hotel Impossible host, Anthony Melchiorri, told her she would have to answer the previous cat Matilda’s emails. Alice tells me she responded to Melchiorri with a simple ‘yay’. Yeah, that’s the whole story, I mean this is the hotel where Harold Ross spoke about starting the New Yorker, and Alice responds with, ‘yay’ … riveting material I tell you.

I – Hamlet VIII – on the other hand, have a story to tell. I grew up in a feral cat colony on the streets of Long Island. There were a lot of us on the streets, and so we were in constant competition for food and shelter. Avoiding humans – who saw our type as a growing problem and in need of elimination – was a big part of our day-today survival. I ran into some trouble with the humans once, they trapped and neutered me, and before setting me loose again, clipped my one ear. They said it was to show potential caretakers that I was neutered, but I know it was to make sure I would never forget who controlled me out there. After this, I knew I wanted a better life, and so I made sure to stay close to a place I later learned was called a pet shelter. These places seemed to have a lot of animals that were in control of the humans, and so I hung around learning this art. My determination and natural talent got me discovered pretty quickly after this. I was signed by the shelter and they later called Alice who was in search for the new Algonquin king. The rest is history.

I am hanging around the reception pushing against the legs of the hotel staff making sure I give them equal attention when Savannah walks into the hotel. She looks anxious, and out of place but lightens up quickly, clearly enchanted by the hotel lobby, and a large painting of the famous ‘Round Table’ members. Typical. Even though I can’t take full responsibility for the lobby, it is my territory. I even have a tree house right on the front desk. Alice felt we needed more vertical space so she got the Algonquin to agree to a specially designed tree house that replicates the lobby. The tree has three levels of perching space built around it, a marble house at the base lined with Algonquin carpeting. The house looks like it has been here since Billy was around. I have a sign right in front the marble entrance that reads, ‘shh, please do not disturb’ but of course people always do.

I jump onto the front desk to make my presence known. I was going to let my hotel staff do the preliminary introductions before I take over but Savannah reaches over the desk to put her big hand on my head to give it a quick rub. This really should shock me more, but humans are always breaking appropriate social boundaries. It is more the baby voices she uses to address me that make me cringe; I mean I wasn’t expecting a Dorothy Parker but I thought we could keep some literary repertoire. I make the decision to make this interview quick, but then Savannah asks the front desk for Alice and as I am about to interject to say I can take it from here Alice walks in and I realize Savannah has not even come here to speak to me.

Now they move to the dining area – a spot I know I am not allowed – so I sit on a lobby luggage cart keeping my eye on Alice to make sure she doesn’t go too far off the PR script. It’s Valentine's Day and Alice has dressed to theme, wearing a red blouse, a red flowery patterned scarf and long red nails in addition to her usual loose but professional looking black pants, blazer and square glasses that rest on the middle of her nose. I hear her tell Savannah, that she can tell it’s Valentine’s Day because someone actually held a door open for her this morning. God, this is going to go worse than I thought.

But to my shock Savannah seems to find Alice’s answers riveting, quickly scribbling down notes. Alice tells her how she has been working in the hotel industry all her life, and that she grew up in the Bronx. Straight out of school, Alice got her first hotel job. It was here that one of her managers told her that she is either going to love it or hate it and if she loves it, she has to realize that most hotel people have a little screw loose somewhere, “and it fit!” Alice says. I love my Alice, but I tend to agree about the screw loose thing, especially when she tries to make me sit before I take my treat.

Finally – clearly bored of each other – Alice and Savannah look up at me. Alice, thinking I am in search of a treat, comes towards me calling me king, hammy, ham or could it have been baba? The nicknames come often and are continuously changing. This is probably why people around here call her the crazy cat lady, this or maybe because she gets really angry when people don’t look after me properly when she isn’t around. I cannot fully be blamed for getting her this title though; she was definitely a crazy cat lady before my time. Alice has her own cats back home, three indoor and many feral garden cats, and she goes on about them like they are famous. I have never been to her house to see them, but the last cat Matilda III stayed there for a while when our palace was closed for renovations and she confirmed there was nothing special about these cats.

Finally while watching me spread myself across the front desk they get back to my story. After leaving the shelter with Alice, I arrived at the Algonquin to start my training. I was in line to take over from Matilda III. There have been three Matildas and eight Hamlets, including me, and of course the original Billy at the hotel. The first Hamlet was named after a loyal Algonquin guest and actor John Barrymore whose famous role was Shakespeare's Hamlet. Alice tells Savannah how I lived upstairs, while Matilda stayed a while longer to teach me the ropes. I think Alice is saying this to make Matilda look better now that she has passed, but let me be clear, Matilda did not teach me shit. I sat upstairs in the office while she lay around the lobby until one day they took her away and a trainer came in to give me the real training.

Although every Algonquin cat has been well known, Matilda III was said to be the most loved. She even had a book written about her. Of course, this changed when I came around. I was the first tabby cat from Long Island, and so I brought some real color to the legacy, and this made me even more beloved. I used to get two or three emails a day, but since my presence on social media, I get fewer because my fans can now communicate with me through other platforms. I ask Alice to take photos of me on the job, but she only has an old flip phone and therefore has to get the other staff to help her out, which is a little embarrassing. She does the uploading herself though and helps me with the captions. I don’t feel bad about making her caption my photos; she loves writing and this allows her to be creative. Some of the best pieces of literature were drafted in these walls, and I feel like Instagram captions like ‘Wait fur it’ and ‘Pawsing to take a nap’ should be ranked right up there with them.

I now have 13 599 Facebook followers and 3537 on Instagram. Honestly, I think I would have more, if Alice were more selective about the pictures she posts of me, and if she spent a little care selecting the right filters. I get gifts like stuffed teddy bears and portraits that all resemble me, as well as letters and postcards from around the world. My favorite gift has been the Bonito Flakes from a lovely man from Japan. Alice, being the sentimental one, liked the request we got from a grandmother asking me to contact her granddaughter on her birthday. I prefer to communicate through social media but oblige because Alice asked and she is the one who feeds me in the morning.

Savannah and Alice go sit back down as they speak about Alice’s many pets. “My mother liked cats, my father loved dogs, so I had Parakeets”, I hear Alice say for the thousandth time. This is her go-to story with hotel guests; she thinks that bit is hilarious. I know Alice prefers cats now though; she has had cats since 1992. Alice likes to say that dog people are the ‘Mickey Mouses’, and cat people are the ‘Bugs Bunnies’ of life because they are quirkier. I am not sure exactly what that means, but I do agree that cat people must be way more interesting.

I had to share the hotel with some show dogs and worse show dog people a couple of weeks ago. The dogs were competing at the Westminster Dog Show. They make up some of our regular guests each year, and all stay in the rooms with their humans. The first year the dogs came to stay, Alice made a big fuss about getting a dog in here beforehand to make sure I would play nice with the important guests. I couldn’t care less about the dogs though; it was their annoying owners who kept fussing around them that pissed me off. We get a lot of animals in here; the Algonquin is known for being pet-friendly. Just yesterday, Alice organized an Algonquin visit for my cat friend Pip the famous Beach Cat.

It’s tough to admit, but my popularity with guests and the attention I get from media around the world isn't only because of my charming and chill personality. The rejuvenated interest in the Algonquin cat legacy instead has a lot to do with Alice. If Savannah would pay me any attention this is the kind of thing I had practiced telling her for her profile on Alice. Pet journalist, author and my friend Sandy Robins, believes that even though the hotel has had a cat since the 1920s, they owe a lot to Alice for reviving the status of the Algonquin Cat. Sandy says that Alice recognized the marketing role a famous cat can play for the publicity of the hotel as well as realized the value of having a pet-friendly image, which appeals to the now growing crowd of animal lovers. Sandy sometimes forgets that I am the content and therefore the influencer in this duo but I do agree: Alice and I make a powerful team. I don’t like to deal with people in real life too often so I leave the business side to Alice while I focus on my online image. I would say I am up there with some of the big pet influencer names. So far we have Merrick Pet foods sponsoring us, but I am sure there are more sponsors in the works.

It’s no Buzzfeed but in 2015 – before my time – Forbes did a piece on Matilda III and valued her at an estimate of $1 Million worth of exposure for the hotel that year. It’s not all about Matilda though, Alice says after the children’s book, Hamlet: The Algonquin Cat by Leslie Martini, my social media presence and the events I host, I may even be worth more these days. I don’t get out of my own hotel much but Sandy says many hotels have realized the worth of animal mascots. Although I like to think of myself as one of a kind, I will acknowledge this is a trend growing in leaps and bounds.

Alice hasn’t only added value to the hotel; she’s also had a positive impact by promoting shelter animals and raising money for strays like me in the city. Because of my background, this is a very important issue to me, plus it doesn’t hurt to promote this kind of thing on my social media. Every year, Alice plans a birthday party for me, in the form of a pet fashion show to raise money for animal shelters in New York City.

The fashion show happens at the beginning of August each year to celebrate both the Matildas’ birthdays as well as mine. I tend to hang back by the lobby and watch from my tree house. I feel bad for well-known pet fashion designer Ada Nieves who designs an outfit for me each year. I can only bear to wear it for a couple of minutes, mostly just long enough for a photo op. Last year she designed a Shakespearean Hamlet coat for me, but I try to avoid the catwalk, especially when Alice starts to call all the cats MEWdels instead of models. The event raises about $10 000 each year, for 150 shelters in the New York area. This makes me proud; it is important to give back to my community, I will always have my little clipped ear to remind me of the streets, no matter how famous I become.

Although fame can sometimes be hard, I think it is especially hard on Alice when I am criticized. She says it is the hardest part of the job, dealing with negative emails and press. Alice is recounting an email I received a while ago, “you know, I agree, Hamlet is a little overweight, but you don’t need to tell me he is ... FAT.” She was really angry about that one. I wasn’t a fan either, but can we blame my follower, I have told Alice a million times not to post pictures of my bad angles. Alice also hates dealing with emails telling her that a hotel is no place for a cat to live, that it is cat abuse having me in the constant spotlight. I always laugh at this one, because clearly, these critics have never been to Long Island. I mean are they kidding, I live in Midtown Manhattan now, like hell I am going back.

I doubt my opinions will make it into Savannah’s piece though, because she and Alice are just yapping on about the time Alice moved to Brazil. They haven’t looked my way in a while, and I can see Savannah is getting ready to leave. I am about to lose my patience and then I hear Alice say that I -Hamlet VIII – will be her last cat because I deserve to be at the Algonquin for a long time. So maybe Alice has some interesting things to say after all.

Alice hopes to retire before I do, and I have to admit it will be hard to see her go. She was the one who chose me, took me out of the Bideawee Animal Shelter and brought me here. She found Matilda III too at the North Shore Animal League. She is our rescuer, our feeder, our PR manager, our Algonquin Cat Officer.

Saturday Morning at DeKalb: A Photo Series

Ira Glass in an episode of This American Life compares library spaces to JK Rowling’s Room of Requirement. In Harry Potter, the Room of Requirement is a space that will be anything you need it to be, you just need to think it. If you spend some time at the DeKalb branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on a Saturday morning, you will understand what Ira Glass means.

At 10 a.m. on a Saturday, the library opens its wood-framed glass doors and transforms into the many spaces imagined up in the minds of the people who stream in. For some, it is a quiet place to read the morning newspaper, or to open the pages of a new novel. For others, the speedy wifi transforms the space into a video game, research or web-browsing hub. New Yorkers come for computer lessons, town hall meetings, story time, or even to vote in participatory budgeting. And some simply come to sit in a space that is safe, social and serene.

Now more than ever libraries are under threat due to budget cuts, lack of resources and the simple misunderstanding of the relevance of libraries today. This photo series sets out to show how this space ­– by adapting and transforming as its community does – is timeless and boundless.

Preaching Through the Choir

An oral history of activism and expression in South African choral music

“It reverberated from deep underground, it seeped through above onto the streets, into Egoli, City of Gold, Johannesburg. It bled to other urban centres, the harbour in Durban, and the diamond city, Kimberly.”

Dumping Knowledge: The reality of large-scale book donations to Africa

As soon as Wendy Saul heard that one million books would be arriving at a huge warehouse in Monrovia, Liberia she started to picture the sight straight away. One million beautiful new books, perfectly chosen for children that resemble the students she taught, all stacked up for her to see in one large room – how glorious. With this in mind, Saul excitedly makes her way to the warehouse just in time to see large boxes labeled ‘One Million Books’ being transferred from trucks into a warehouse containing large sorting tables. But Saul’s excitement quickly diminishes when she sees the nature of the books.

 Earlier on that year, George Bush announced that he would be donating 1.2 million textbooks and school furniture to the Liberian Government that would be distributed to public schools and libraries. And now, Saul was looking at the fulfilled promise. Originally from America, she was living in Liberia to start up a literacy program through the Canadian organisation, CODE, who was working on the global development of literacy. The program was in desperate need of books but these one million books were not going to solve Saul’s problem. Instead of finding new textbooks, the boxes were filled with dog-eared, old and used books that had no relevance to the children she had been teaching. She mentions seeing books to help students do their LSATs in Spanish, and books for microwave cooking. She remembers seeing CDs as well, ‘I mean this was at time when kids were sitting under street lamps to do their homework because there was no electricity at home. The idea that people would have CD players at home for educational CDs from Scholastic was so weird ’. It was clear to her that these books had not been carefully selected.

 The one million books were shipped through an organisation called Books for Africa and belong to a larger ecosystem of books donated to Africa each year by similar organisations. Books For Africa has shipped over 43 million books to 55 countries in Africa since their start in 1988. Last year alone they sent 2.3 million books and raised $2.2 million dollars to do so. They are the largest of these organisations but not the only one. International Book Bank between 1987 and 2016 sent over 30 million books, Library Projects have donated 2.6 million books since they were founded in 2005 while Book Friends have sent 180 000 books since 2004. In the United States, books are donated by individuals and publishers – who are donating their excess stock – and stored in large warehouses in port cities. They are then loaded into 20 to 40 foot containers that hold between 40, 000 to 80,000 books accordingly. These containers are shipped to various ports in Africa where a local organisation is then expected to take over. According to International Book Bank, the books take about 1 week to pack, 4-6 weeks on the water and 1 week to deliver to the organisation in the country.

 This is clearly a colossal process but each organisation emphasise in their mission statements how it contributes to the must needed move towards solving the illiteracy problem that plagues Africa, which is commonly referred to on these organisations’ websites as the ‘book desert’. The specifics of where in Africa is often never addressed and serves to be confusing when thinking of countries such as Zimbabwe, Libya, Botswana, South Africa, Equatorial Guinea, to name a few that all have high literacy rates. But the way Africa is homogenised and often misrepresented on these sites is not where the problem ends, because for African countries that do indeed have very low literacy rates and are in desperate need for reading material, these book donations from the US could be doing more damage than good.

 Angered by what she saw at Bush’s warehouse, Saul decided she wanted to change how these organisations were donating books. She decided to get involved with a book organisation started by CODE called International Book Bank. She knew they were struggling, and was sure the books they were sending over resembled the state of books donated by Bush. Saul remembers her first visit to the IBB warehouse in Baltimore; she says ‘the books they were receiving were junk and the warehouse was dangerous.’ With Saul’s help, they started making changes. They moved to a new warehouse and developed a system to sort books, and a program that allowed them to input the books they were receiving so that organisations in Africa could select what books they needed before they were sent over. Saul’s goal was to get the right books to the right children. Doing it this way became very costly however, and eventually IBB wasn’t able to fund it. They sold their warehouses, and eventually used the money they made from this to start working with local publishers in Liberia to develop a series of children’s books that would be culturally relevant.

 International Book Bank is the rare example however, and as shown, there are still a number of book donating companies who are still using the old model of donating large containers of unsorted books, making the process a lot cheaper for the organisations. Although not made obvious on their websites, these organisations are also charging either the local organisations receiving the books or another entity funding the donation for the shipment and handling fees. Books For Africa’s home page brags in their first line that they have:

 A simple name for an organization with a simple mission. We collect, sort, ship, and distribute books to students of all ages in Africa. Our goal: to end the book famine in Africa.

 Similarly Bookfriends International’s mission ‘is to provide hope to secondary school students and teachers in Africa who lack books, through the donation of new and used quality text books, library books and educational materials.’ That these are companies acting as essentially a carrier service is never made obvious. Books For Africa will even charge more for shipments of books that have been sorted beforehand.

 There are also benefits for the publishers donating books. In Booking in Iowa, author Joseph Michaud, explains how the cost of setting up print presses to print books was so high that publishers would rather print large quantities at once and store the excess in warehouses. In 1979, the US government passed a tax law that stated that publishers would be taxed on books that were stored in warehouses after a year of being printed. Publishers, however, worked out that it was still cheaper to do large print runs and risk the possibility of them being left with excess copies than have to do reprints. If a book was not selling, they would donate these books to organisations such as Books For Africa and could even charge a small handling fee. This of course means, that the books being donated are books that have already proved to be unpopular amongst US readers. Saul further tells me how many US companies would fund large shipments of books because of the tax breaks on them. Even though, these books were coming from remainder stocks, and often donated with only a small handling fee, they could record it at the full sale value of the books. Saul, says for example, that an organisation could order a shipload of $20 000 worth of books from IBB to ship to Africa, but could write it off as $140 000.

 But even though people are making money it should not matter if it means children are receiving reading material when previously they had none but unfortunately, as Saul has shown, a lot of what is being sent are not even in the right languages or at all relevant to the context where they are being received. This begs the question, what is happening to the unreadable material. We know that in the US, most of this material being donated was heading to landfills, this is a fact made obvious by many of the organisations. Better World books for example state that two billion pounds of books go into American landfills each year, they continue by proudly saying their donations divert these books instead to places in Africa. It is clear that these organisations are not blatantly telling people to rather dump their books in African landfills. Instead, they are saying why not donate your books rather than throw them away but it is hard to imagine that LSSAT and microwave cooking books are ending up anywhere but landfills once shipped to Liberia.

 In 2012, AllAfrica published an article questioning the whereabouts of the 1.2 million books that were donated by George Bush. It had been four years and various public schools and libraries that were supposed to benefit from the donation remained empty. When asking Saul, she couldn’t say where the books went either. AllAfrica say there is suspicion that they were sold in the private sector, a common occurrence of donated goods that come from the US to parts of Africa. Andrew Brooks’ study on clothes being donated to Africa highlights how clothes are more often sold in informal market spaces than freely distributed. If you hit the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa you will find a variety of books by American authors that journalist Griffin Shea believes are coming from the large containers of excess books from the US.

 The discrepancy of availability and prices of American and British books versus local material in the African informal and formal book markets are astonishing, even in countries with prominent local publishing industries. Locally published books are still always harder to find and cost a lot more on average than a book imported by foreign publishers or through informal passages. In a TED Talks, Chimamanda Adichie speaks about growing up and only being able to read British and American books, because those were widely available while African novels were scarce. Adichie says: ‘the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature’. Adichie, who knew she wanted to be a writer at a young age, found that all her characters and places she wrote about were foreign; they were not like the people and communities she grew up around:

All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out... We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

 She thought it was these foreign elements that defined what it was to be literary until she was introduced to writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, who taught her that literary characters could be people like her. Saul, further points to how a lot of the time, even when the books are in good shape, or targeted for children, and end up in the places that need them, the stories are not culturally appropriate especially in the Young Adult genre. Saul says that often books that are age appropriate for American children are often not for children of the same age in other cultures: ‘children in America are comfortable with topics like sex, ghouls and goblins, but things like this would be considered very verboten for children in Liberia she says.

 Adichie and Saul highlight the importance of the development of local publishing in both areas where the industry is almost non-existent as well as in places such as Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa where there is a strong industry but the cost of publishing is still inhibitive. Saul through International Book Bank has been funding publishing projects in Liberia where publishing is almost non-existent but there is a rich culture of storytelling. They are using Ghana’s existing industry to try help with the printing and production of the books.

 Saul and IBB have also developed an intellectual property course that is free online for publishers to encourage collaborations by different African publishers so that books published from local perspectives in local languages can be translated and modified to serve other communities around Africa. IBB believe that often issues of copyright and intellectual property transfer impede these mutually beneficial arrangements.

 The money spent on shipping large amounts of books from America could further be given to existing local publishing companies, to print larger quantities of books. Theses books could be bought and donated to communities that need them. This would in turn decrease the cost of production per book allowing local books to be sold for cheaper, and therefore making them more widely available.

 It is clear, that the old donating structures still widely used today are out-dated and not useful and highlight how countries in Africa are still greatly misunderstood and misrepresented by powers in the West. These organisations and the discourse around donating books to Africa undermine the rich wealth of literature coming from the continent, as well as the authors and publishers producing it. These contemporary African books are doing work in representing the African experience in robust, authentic and contemporary ways that resist reductionist stereotypes of the continent. It may be time that Africa starts donating their books to the West.

East Village Shoe Repair: A Photo Series

If you have never been to New York City, and you rely on 90s sitcoms as your reference for it, you would not be surprised to walk into the East Village Shoe Repair. A street-level, train-car sized shop, jammed and boiling to the brim with things: yellow receipts and slightly saturated polaroids of bands pasted to the wall, old shoes, sole-less, double-platformed, and toeless … everywhere, clothes and clothes and clothes piled high in black bags, sewing machines, spray cans, and two men that look like they have not left the shop for a couple of decades. 

Boris Zuborev and Eugene Finkelberg have been New York cobblers since 1994 when they opened East Village Shoe Repair on St Mark’s Place. While the name has stuck, they now find themselves in Bushwick, Brooklyn with the rest of the village veterans who can’t afford Manhattan anymore. 

I first walked into the East Village Shoe Repair when I needed some mending on a backpack that I was not ready to let go of yet. Quickly, the two intended visits — a drop-off and pick up —  turned into many. It took a couple of months for Eugene, who appeared to do most of the cobbling, to reline my backpack but by the time it was done I had almost forgotten my reason for my visits. Boris, who did all the talking, would fill my visits with stories of their time in the village, making shoes for anyone who was about to become anything —  the original club kids of the 90s, stars like Lady Gaga and Madonna and even for brands like Nike. The shop I visited in 2019 was frequented by people wanting school kicks repaired, work leathers polished,  discount designers, or a re-soling but Boris assures me the custom platform biz is thriving in their new location. 

The photo series illustrates my time with Eugene and Boris at their little shop in their new village.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela

Winnie had lived many lives; she was loved by many and equally hated by others. Her death left a nation divided in how she should be remembered. This is the story of her complicated legacy.