Happy Nice Mall

One rainy spring morning, an old cherry tree was starting to bloom in a small park on Cherry Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Several protesters surrounded the tree to protect it from New York City workers who were about to cut it down. Police officers entered, arresting the protesters, and the sound of a chainsaw filled the air. The tree fell.

“Here’s the last cherry tree on Cherry Street,” said poet Eileen Myles, 72, standing in the drizzle that witnessed the event. “There have been cherry trees here for centuries. But not anymore.”

For over a year, the author of more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including the cult-hit novel “Chelsea Girls,” Myles has been an ardent crusader in the struggle between a group of Lower East Side residents. will be the city’s forces. The controversial issue demolition East River Park’s 50 acres of urban waterfront green space and cherry trees that lie alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive have been cut to fit the city’s plans.

Using the pronoun “they” and wearing tinted glasses, slightly ripped jeans, and a brown trucker hat, Myles snapped a photo of the tree-based carnage with his cell phone and sent On Instagram with over 30,000 followers.

“The trees talk to each other,” they said. “They speak through their roots. This tree knew this was coming.”

the city started tearing Below East River Park last year as part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, a plan This aims to improve the flood protection capabilities of the region. After the existing park is demolished, the city plans to raise it 8 to 10 feet by covering it with landfill and actually rebuild it.

Activists do not dispute the need for some kind of climate-driven action, but they oppose the city’s strategy of razing a park beloved by generations of Lower East Siders who appreciate its dirty athletic fields, rusty barbecue pits and concrete chess tables.

Next to Myles was Sarah Wellington, an artist in her 30s who shrunk in the rain, wearing Democracy Now! she carried her bag and took a video of the workers with her phone. “We believe these cherry trees are between 80 and 100 years old,” she said. “This is Indigenous land stolen in 1643 and now everything is happening again.”

“I didn’t know much about Eileen Myles until recently,” he added, “but I know Eileen is a lightning bolt. You should see Eileen running.”

The previous morning, Myles was arrested after suddenly crossing the same site. to defend from cutting down a tree. They spent most of the day in the nearby Seventh District. “You need time to be arrested and I didn’t have much to do yesterday.” “But it felt good to be arrested. It’s civil disobedience,” he said.

These days, Myles enjoys the status of a respected cultural figure in downtown New York. Their careers have included a collection of poems published on a mimeograph machine in the 1970s and a memoir book funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship in recent years, and they are now frequently stopped on the street by young and respectful writers who want to express their appreciation for Myles’ work. produced in a braver city that lives only in legend. Protecting lost New York is one reason Myles is one of the park’s guardians.

A resident East Village apartment with the same rental stability since the 1970s, Myles worked on the margins for decades before experiencing a mainstream revival On the 2015 reprint of the 1994 autobiographical novels, “chelsea girls“It gained new fans, suddenly the bookstore appeared in tote bags at Brooklyn coffee shops, and a character based on the author appeared on the show”Transparent”

However, during his years of obscurity and literary fame, East River Park was the author’s trusted urban oasis. Myles was scribbling poems while smoking and sitting on the benches. They stretched their legs to the same tree for 40 years before they went for a run. And during the bleakest times of the pandemic, they found solace by watching the river.

So when he put the city plan into action, Myles took action. They used their appearance at literary events to convey the message and wrote an impassioned article in defense of the park. Art Forum. They organized a march that brought out New Yorkers like Chloë Sevigny and Ryan McGinley and helped form an activist group, “1000 people 1000 treesEven though the demolition work is ongoing, they have persistently protested on the site, posting pictures of workers using chainsaws on Instagram to post them under titles like “Woodkiller”.

Thanks.

thomp.

After the last of the cherry tree was also thrown into a shredder, the workers began mowing down a London plane and its now amputated limbs were falling to the ground. One activist let out a sad cry. Myles locked his arms with the three protesters and began to sing into the tree.

“Things that once seemed stale don’t seem stale to me anymore,” Myles said as they began to return their bikes to the East Village. “Since it all started for me more than a year ago, it has become my heart. At that time, my girlfriend said to me, ‘I feel like I lost you in the park’.”

demolition East River Parkwhich? Robert Moses Built in the 1930s, it dates back to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 when Lower Manhattan was devastated by flooding.

FDR Drive became part of the East River and there was an explosion at the Con Ed factory on 14th Street that caused a power outage. Elderly residents of the public housing projects surrounding the park, including the Baruch Homes and Jacob Riis Homes, were stranded in their buildings for days due to flooding. Applying flood protection to lower Manhattan has become a priority and the city’s attention returned to East River Park.

Initially, there was a plan that the activists wholeheartedly supported. Without needing to radically alter the park itself, he proposed building a giant levee along the west side of the site, relying on East River Park as a natural sponge. However, while the Blasio administration was expected to complete the project in 2018, the city declared that this plan was not viable and proceeded with its current strategy. Many community members were outraged. An opposition group East River Park ActionHe sued the city last year, but was largely unsuccessful in court.

“We definitely know Eileen Myles and have seen what they think and write about the park,” said Ian Michaels, spokesperson for the city’s Design and Construction Department. “Protesters have the right to protest. The timeline has been affected by some cases, but the project is ongoing.”

Some of the phone-using activists had to contend with accusations that they were practicing the brand of civic selfishness that goes with the term Nimby-ism. “Some have said we are just white left-handed tree huggers,” Myles said. “How come I’m still just a mediator after 44 years here?”

Last spring morning, 55-year-old Elizabeth Ruiz, a longtime resident in a nearby residential complex, was walking her Shih Tzu past protesters as city workers cut down Cherry Street trees. Known in the neighborhood as DJ Dat Gürl Kıvırcık, Ms. Ruiz made house and disco sets in the park’s amphitheater for years until the band shell was played. bulldozer last December.

“At the end of the day, I’m not that angry about gentrification and change,” he said. “But I don’t understand why they have to destroy the trees and everything else in the park. If you knock down a tree here, you knock me down too.”

After cycling back to the East Village, Myles sat down to breakfast at Veselka and began to remember coming to New York City in the 1970s at the age of 24. aspirations Being a poet – it was a time when the idea of ​​the city pumping money into a dilapidated city park would have been ridiculous.

Growing up in a working-class Roman Catholic household near Boston, Myles found the scene they were looking for in the old East Village church. poetry project. There they befriended big names like Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, and Allen Ginsberg, and smoked in back rooms while the writers talked about the craft. Myles waited at the tables at Tin Palace, a jazz and poetry club in the Bowery, to pay the rent, and worked as a librarian, bouncer, bike courier, and clerk at Bleecker Bob’s, the Greenwich Village record store. While working for a radical lesbian newspaper delivery company, they drove around town in a pink truck, while also delivering massive gay male pornography magazines and music publications.

“When I finally got here, I was like, ‘Wait, you mean this city is really real?’ I said. “Bob Dylan was here. Andy Warhol was here. Everyone who drove a taxi was writing a novel. Every waitress was a dancer. I was surprised that people in New York were really what they said they were.”

In the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis ravaged New York City, Myles watched as close friends died. Encouraged to embrace sobriety, Myles formed a bond with the park: they blasted Maria Callas singing along, running past trash and needles along the East River at dusk.helpOn a Walkman to honor an opera-loving friend who died of illness.

“I stopped drinking and drugging and that’s when I started jogging in the park,” Myles said. “It became my ritual and remained so for years. It has been my tool for my mental health. Park has been the best writing studio I have ever been in.”

As Myles sees it, the park is also a time capsule in the city centre, a green urban ruin guarding an almost destroyed city.

“There was time to make a lot of mistakes back then,” Myles said. “There was time to lose, and that’s what everyone deserves. And the park is wasted space. Uncontrolled local area. Then the city said, ‘This cannot be.'”

After Myles left Veselka, they prepared to speak to the novelist Colm Tóibín at the Strand bookstore that evening. During the event, they talked about their struggle for the park. The next day they drove to Marfa, Texas, where they bought a house a few years ago. Rescue pit bulls would join Honey and finish a mission for The New Yorker; In the story, they intended to make a reference to the park.

In fact, the park now seeps into Myles’ work constantly, especially his poetry. A recent poem, “120 Years and What You’ve Seen,” ends:

I’m looking up, you’re shaking

don’t meet, you’re bigger, you’re smarter, you’re stronger

from me and always will be. each of us walking

around and blessing

today you

and you

anytime

be a TREE