Trickle Down

Glimpses from the 2020 Park Avenue Tulip Dig.

Made it just in time this year to catch the tail end, on the last day right before Memorial Day weekend.  The pickings were a bit slim.  Though, truth be told, procrastinator that I am, I never have arrived "early" or even midway through (work impeded that this year), so I don't know what the bulb selection is like when the pickings aren't slim - for all I know, it's exactly like this.  Beggars can't be choosers.

The fearless, not at all shy American robin that hopped around watching me dig up bulbs at one of the median beds.  I think it was waiting to see if any bugs would come up in the process - easy lunch, smart fellow.

It is sort of mind boggling that every year the Fund for Park Avenue just gets rid of these high quality bulbs, pulls them up for the compost pile (and then replaces them with brand new annuals every year).  Granted, the blooms weaken each year, and the tulip medians ARE a visual calling card for Park Avenue, but still, it seems such a waste.  That they have the means to just put in new bulbs each year, while elsewhere in the city there is just concrete or empty, compacted dirt pits - very much a metaphor for the wealth disparity in New York City these days.  Sigh.

That said, thankful the fancy folks of Park Avenue provide an opportunity for sharing and for the bulbs to live on.  The paradigmatic Reaganomic trickle down.  I suppose there's some economic and social balancing in that - when it works properly.  The bulb redistribution sort mostly lives up to the theory.  This year, my goal was to gather enough for the adopted tree pits in my neighborhood, Yorkville.  One of the pits is on York Avenue.  Maybe with some beautification, there will be more foot traffic, and some economic benefit to the shops on that block.  The other sidewalk tree pits are on residential streets - maybe home values will trickle down from Park Avenue to York Avenue too - ha! I shouldn't be so dismissive; there may be some minimal effect.

The process.  Bulbs didn't seem to be dug in so deep this year.  No need for the shovel that I brought along.  Though I did damage the handle of a trowel trying to lever out a bulb.  Oh well.

The haul.  Not yet counted.  I had wanted to try for more, but hadn't had lunch, and all the digging and looking down, up, down, up started to make me lightheaded.  Plus, I had a Zoom call scheduled to catch up with high school acquaintances that late afternoon.  Turns out it got postponed... ups and downs of trying to fit in gardening and socializing into an off Friday.

When I am asked where I live, I have become careful to specify Yorkville, rather than the broader "Upper Eastside."  The latter encompasses Lenox Hill and Carnegie Hill and Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue.  Those are very different addresses from the more middle class Yorkville, which back in the day was a German and Hungarian immigrant working class area, with breweries and some of the first tenement alternatives for the laboring masses.

Two personal anecdotes: First, from seventh grade.  I was fortunate enough to test into Hunter College High School, which was my and my family's introduction to the New York City system of selective schools - the ticket out of the workable, but not stellar, schools we would have been zoned for in our working and middle class central Queens neighborhood.  To get to Hunter, back in the rough and tumble 80s, I commuted by car with my dad in the mornings to his job in East Harlem.  And in the afternoons, not wanting their firstborn daughter on the big, scary subways, my parents had me on a private student van to Queens.  The only other girl on it was AS.  The first day of school, she was the last to get on, and eyeing the boys, plopped down next to me.  Her first words were a brag apology, "Sorry I was late getting on.  I was talking to JS over there.  HE lives on Park Avenue, so he's walking home."  Now, I had had a pretty typical, sheltered childhood, revolving around my family and my central Queens community, where we were probably squarely in the middle of the pack economically by the time I was in sixth grade - we had a used car, took maybe a "big" vacation once a year or every other year that required flying and hotels, sometimes got name brand clothing (Reeboks) that we wore to death; I knew of an outside world because we had been refugees, but had not traveled internationally other than car trips to Canada to see Niagara Falls.  I had a sense of where I stacked relative to the kids in elementary school - the little fish pond.  I didn't know about Manhattan lifestyles at all in that pre-internet existence.  But as soon as AS got on that van that first day of seventh grade and talked about JS, her tone told me everything I needed to know about what it meant to have a Park Avenue address.

Second: With my middle school introduction to Manhattan neighborhoods, when it came time to choose my first post law school abode, convenience and safety were key.  My first BigLaw employer was in midtown east, so the Upper Eastside was a natural choice - safe and a single subway line away, and affordable around Lexington and to the east (when Madonna bought her adjoining townhouses east of Lexington, some society person or other made a reference to her moving to the "Far Eastside").  And when it came to buy, having been bamboozled by a broker to reach for the upper end of our price range with the first post law school apartment - but gaining a terrace in the city for the first time - I insisted upon outdoor space, and moved farther east to be able to afford that.

So, the tale of two worlds of the larger UES, and how I "downgraded" across decades from Park to York.