The cop in the main photo beckoned me over and I was worried he would confiscate my camera. But when I told him the pics were for personal consumption he was disappointed. “You mean I’m not going to be in some magazine?”

Forbes Woman

I’m going to be writing once or twice a week for Forbes Woman, about womany businessy stuff. My first post went up Friday. It’s about Rupert Murdoch and his immensely successful yet dysfunctional family. Are they good models for a family business? Are they?

Union Square, sometime btw. 1910 and 1915, via Flickr

Since I’ve returned to New York, I haven’t had time to post. This surprised me, but let me tell you why: New York is hard. I had thought that I’d return from my protracted stay in Dublin all relaxed and refreshed — which I did. But I had forgotten that New York likes to flay you alive before she lets you live here. My plan was to stay with a friend for a week until I found a place to live. Since difficult flatmates precipitated my earlier frequent house-moves, I would live alone and would take a lease for a year. Little did I know how much more complicated it would be.

After a month of looking during which I crashed on an air mattress in my friend’s living room (thank you, L!), I did find an apartment. The landlord did this crazy thing — which is quite typical, I believe — where he tells two people they can have the flat, then lets each of them know that someone else is on their way with paperwork and deposit. He gives the apartment to the person who gets there first. The adrenalin rush of that experience almost sounds like fun, except that when you’re living out of a suitcase, looking and looking for a home, it isn’t. Anyhow, I missed that apartment but luckily the landlord had another, which he was in the process of renovating. I took that.

He asked for extra time to finish the work, but it kept taking longer and longer. The morning I turned up with movers and all my stuff he said: “Can I have ten more minutes?” I said no and so a workman nailed slats of wood to the floor while I unpacked. That weekend, I became extremely, worryingly sick, and instead of spending the two days nesting, was huddled in bed in the foetal position which was the only one that wasn’t painful. A trip to a local doc revealed my ailment to be benign, requiring only antibiotics to make it go away. Then I set about getting internet, furniture, and kitchen items, since I had none.

Three weeks later I’m living in my little studio in Bushwick, which is in fact lovely. It’s light and bright and a tree is at the window. Furniture is coming later today. The landlord, who is Greek, is quite nice in a funny, shifty way. It has taken a while to get an internet connection because, as I learnt soon after moving, the legality of my residence is somewhat dubious. I won’t go into this more here but it also means that I have no doorbell and the mailman ignores my letter-box. I recently befriended my mailman, so that may help.

All in all, it’s looking like things will be okay and after almost two months in NYC, I’m starting to feel more or less at home. I will have enough energy to begin seeing friends soon. The refreshed, relaxed feelings that I brought back with me from Ireland have vanished but I know that I will emerge  from my stressed, grouchy chrysalis as a real, shiny New Yorker.

I’ve discovered a brilliant new writer called Larry McMurtry. He’s so prolific that I didn’t really believe he could be any good until I started to read “Somebody’s Darling” which is glamorous and fun, about a female director in Hollywood and the various men in her life. One of these guys narrates the first section and I was comforted by some lines describing a trip he makes to New York. As a Californian he feels like an awkward outsider.

[New Yorkers] looked strong, smart and indestructible. Their faces were sharp. They all seemed to be talking to others of their kind … New Yorkers seemed total masters of their environment. They knew when to step off the curb and when not to step off the curb. They knew where to buy the best salami and how to avoid muggers and other evils of the wilderness. The wind didn’t bother them. New York was their dessert, their plains, their Canyon de Chelly. The were as tough as the Indians in good Indian movies — as tough as Burt Lancaster in Apache.

And again –

Being in New York was as tiring as walking around with weights on the legs. It was obvious, even after one day, that living there required training. Making it through a month in New York would be the equivalent, for a person of my age and disposition, of competing in the decathlon, in the Olympics of city life. In earlier years the event could have been interesting, but I knew for me it had come a little late.

Okay, this guy is sixty-three, and I’m comparatively young. The gas has stopped leaking in my flat, the hot water and heating are on (though not quite in time for last Saturday’s snowstorm); some of the thousands of dollars that I’m owed have started to float in, albeit to a neighbour’s letterbox. I’m sitting in a chi-chi (fru-fru?) cafe in Greenpoint, cinnamon scents of baking hanging tantalisingly in the air. To my right, a bearded youth is sniffing periodically at his MacBook Pro, to my left a man and woman are talking about films and money, and across the table a blond and brunette have made their way through a selection of conversation topics including a suicidal friend, parental sexuality, books and old age. Life is good. And it will get better.

Loreto Abbey, ceiling on the interior from daft.ie

One of the weird things you see when wandering about Dublin is the number of abandoned buildings. In some ways, this isn’t a surprise: Ireland is known for its ghost towns, unwanted hastily-built leftovers of the boom (the NYT has some excellent pics here). What’s pretty shocking, to me, though, are the old, listed buildings that stand unoccupied and on their way to ruin. Yesterday I walked along the quays past the Ormond Hotel, stopping to wonder at its cracking exterior, only to spot a little circular sign saying that it was a tourist attraction — the setting for the Sirens episode in Joyce’s Ulysses.

Another surprise is Loreto Abbey. When I was growing up it was an exclusive Catholic girls’ boarding school, but now it is is a forlorn husk, sitting grandly and emptily behind bars in Rathfarnham. A friend, who knows the guy managing it, yesterday told me that the interior — which is incredibly beautiful, if these pictures are anything to go by — is starting to crumble because of neglect.

Interior, from Daft.ie

The Abbey was designed by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce and built for the British Member of Parliament, William Palliser, in 1725. It was later inherited by a Rev. John Pallister, and subsequently bought by George Grierson III, the King’s Printer. In 1821 it came into Catholic ownership, when Archbishop Murray of Dublin purchased it for £2,400, and in 1822 a community of nuns made it their home. That year a boarding school was established. The boarding school continued for years, until quite recently (Mother Teresa seems to have studied there); now only the day school survives, in a different building close by the original Abbey.

The Abbey closed in 1999. By 2000, as the property market began to rev up, a firm called Riverside Limited was putting in an application for “A mixed use development to include the retention of Protected Structures. The proposal includes the construction of 317 no. apartments comprising: 270 no. two bedroom apartments; 29 no. one bedroom apartments and 18 no. two bedroom penthouse apartments.” Some of those apartments were indeed built, and some are now occupied (I think they’re behind the Abbey itself — not visible to me from the main road).

I confess that I don’t know what exactly went wrong, and why this gorgeous structure ended up in the so-called Bad Bank of undesirable assets (NAMA); but according to the property website, daft.ie, the building is on the market for “€4,500,000 or €250,000 yearly”. Given that during the boom people were forced to splurge sums of half a million euros or more for two-bed shacks miles from Dublin, that seems to me to be not a lot.

A chapel within the Abbey, from Daft.ie

The biggest pity, though, is that since nobody has the funds to purchase it, the government, or local bodies or individuals are not availing themselves of the space, even for artistic or community purposes. Meanwhile, according to the person I know, the fixtures, stain-glass windows and such, are falling prey to decay and rot.

I took the top and bottom pictures myself earlier this summer, fascinated by such a flagrant display of irresponsibility — a public testament to a nation’s carelessness towards history (I know times are tight — but still). The other photos are from the property website Daft.ie, showing the ornate interior of the Abbey.

Update: Before I left Dublin I photographed another derelict mansion, Aldborough House on Portland Row. Scroll down (below the Abbey) to see those images. There is a very good discussion of its history on this architectural forum, where one extremely learned contributor has written an essay and added pics of the interior.

The Abbey in June 2011 (my pic)

Another sad mansion: Aldborough

Pedimental detail

Front of building, detail

The gate lodge is apparently 19th century

Aldborough, from the road. You can see the broken windows from there.

Ponies in a field

It’s been a long, slow summer, so long and slow that I feel as though I’ve slipped from view (from a digital perspective, my inactivity means that I have). Earlier this year I debated intensely with myself whether to stay in New York or not, and I reached a compromise: I would stay one year more, but spend a substantial amount of the holiday period at home with family in Ireland. So here I am.

Being in Ireland is something that evokes mixed feelings, which mirror, in a way, my mixed feelings towards New York: Ireland is slow and familiar where New York is swift and ferocious. Ireland is full of friendly, over-curious relatives and neighbors, while New York is a wilderness of diverse, different folk. This is the trap of the emigrant/immigrant: no place is really like home.

Besides the extreme relaxation of being on holidays for nine weeks (I’m working part-time, but it’s nothing like the usual), my stay has had some highlights. With my mother I visited her home-county, Leitrim; which is normal enough in itself, but this time I persuaded her to drive up the iron mountain, Sliabh an Iarainn. It was dusk when we started off, and we drove as far as the road would go — it was one of those roads that just stops, inexplicably, at a deserted house. The grey terrain that unfurled in front of us under the dark sky was stunning. There were perhaps one or two houses in sight, tiny white dots, and a fire spread through the fields (deliberately started by farmers to get rid of brush), making the view even more dramatic and ominous.

Another highlight, entirely disconnected from that one, was an evening in the Central Hotel Library Bar in Dublin. It is old-fashioned and smells musty. The walls are lined with dusty tomes, and guests lounge in armchairs from which, if you’re by the window, you can peer out into the dark city. The Library Bar is quiet and intimate and perfect for a conversation with a friend, and it offers a welcome break from Dublin’s raucous drinking culture (a surprisingly persistent aspect of Irish life, which I’ve participated in but never like very much).

The chatter in Ireland is quite fascinating: everyone talks about money, though this time it’s their lack of it, whereas in Celtic Tiger days the talk was of conspicuous consumption, the price of houses and holidays. Rather bewilderingly, restaurants and bars remain full — really full! — and everything is expensive. I pay €2 ($2.90) for a coffee here, compared with $1.75 in Queens or Brooklyn. Having also had the good luck to visit Germany and the UK this summer I can assert that Dublin remains pricier than London, New York, or Berlin.

Ireland had its coldest summer in fifty years this year, and there have been about four moderately sunny days since I arrived in July, so as a heat-lover, I’m looking forward to being back in States. But it’s not just because of the fantastic weather: for now, NYC is where I’m at. I appreciate the earthy scent in Ireland’s air, which, even in Dublin, constantly reminds you that you’re not far from the country; but I still crave the liberating anonymity and carefree chaos of a big city.

The topless lady. Image: http://othelogervacio.tumblr.com

Okay okay — I’ve been remiss. Writing this from Ireland now, I have my last three “best things” about New York:

8. We all know that the US is a crazy place and New York is no exception. On the one hand you have police reprimanding a woman for sporting a short skirt while cycling, or religious leaders who forbid their female followers from wearing tank tops or talking on mobile phones in public. On the other hand, women are legally allowed to walk around topless in NYC — and more importantly, they do!

9. The creative spirit: It’s not fair to say that NYC is the only entrepreuneurial place in the world — apparently Switzerland is the globe’s most innovative country –  but there’s no doubt that New York has a lot going on. It is a city that creative people flock to. A few days before I left NYC I attended a conference run by my friend Amy Schroeder to bring together people from the tech, music and writing industries. It was a huge success and an exciting venture to be part of  (info. about Amy’s DIY Business Association is here).

The DIY Business Association Conference, June 26, 2011. Photo by Eleanor Templeton (from http://diybusinessassociation.com/)

10. Outdoor films — in people’s gardens! This is something of a continuation of no. 9, part of a philanthropic, public-minded entrepreneurial spirit that’s occasionally visible in NYC. Outdoor film screenings are nothing new in cities, but what is special about the one I went to in Astoria a couple of weeks ago is that it’s in someone’s backyard. The guy who runs them is a TV guy who has worked for HBO, and it showed: he made his own witty trailer for the film customized for the Astoria-garden location; his father even featured in it (the trailer), as the tailor who sewed up the screen. Neighbours and friends were invited, food and drink were supplied (and consumed). We sat outside under fairylights in Frank’s garden, sipping our drinks and watching Julie Andrews getting partially naked — something I would otherwise never have seen.

So: I have decided to stay on in New York for another year. The US does terrify me at times, with its fierce, unscrupulous politics and its disdain for those who are less well-off … Yet it remains a fun and exciting place where you can meet lots of generous people.* I’m still a European at heart; but for the next short while, I’ll be over there.

(*And, it goes without saying, lots of ungenerous ones. )

[This post was the last in my series in which I wrote about things that are great about New York -- trying to figure out if I should stay there or leave]

A Soho street corner on a recent sunny day

This may seem obvious, but the sun, and the gorgeously warm summers, are one of the best things about NYC — and, of course, other parts of the US. Basically, in the summer it is hot, and this makes New York utterly different from the country in which I grew up. Ireland is famous for its green fields, but if you know anything at all about the place, you’ll also be aware that the sky there is almost always grey, and that much of the time a soft drizzle hangs in the air. Seasons don’t really exist, and instead you get mild alternations between cold and wet, and chilly and wet. It’s something many people would find depressing, and I am one of them.

New York has a pretty ferocious winter, but its summers are truly glorious. Restaurant tables spill onto the streets, laden with satisfied, sunglass-wearing customers. Everyone is happy because no one could feel grumpy under such a clear sky. If you’re waiting on an outside platform (for instance, in Queens), it no longer seems to matter much when your subway is delayed by 20 minutes. Life starts to feel like a holiday, which is probably because my only other experience of warm weather has been on holidays.

At times the heat can be too much. Last Tuesday, which was especially muggy as the temperature soared towards 90, I saw a man collapsed on the street, his limbs waving helplessly in the air like a daddy longlegs. He had fallen from his bike. He seemed (I hope) to be ok, but an ambulance swiftly took him off. In 2010, several people died from heat exhaustion.

Even so, I’m a total heat junkie, so much so that I don’t have air conditioning, preferring instead to experience NY weather as it really is (I do have a fan). I love when the benign warmth seeps blissfully into my bones. If I leave the city and return to London — which is warmer than Ireland, but not much — this is the thing that I’ll miss most of all.

Summer came late this year, and it was just last week that the heat truly began to bloom. I hopped around in light clothes without a jacket and cycled in the breathy sunlight towards the cafe where I do most of my work. When I called home, my mother told me what she’d been doing that day — sitting by the fire.

[Part of my series of what I love about New York. I'm going to make it to ten, at least.]

Manhattan on a weekend (better not to try to drive ...)

Sunny Soho

Goodnight, Moon!

Zenon Taverna

I was 17 when someone first used this phrase on me, sitting in the gym of our school along with four other girls, about to start the ancient Greek Leaving Certificate exam. The grey-haired moustachioed man who was supervising our endeavours sauntered up and made the joke — “It’s all Greek to me! Hahahaha.” But it was all Greek, I thought stonily, because it was an exam in ancient Greek. Being well-brought-up, I smiled politely. Because I studied Greek for the nine years that followed school, this wasn’t to be the only time I would hear that particular “joke” (the phrase is actually a corrupted quotation of a line in Julius Caesar).

So forgive me for using it in my header here. The thing is, I live in Astoria, and it is all Greek — well, almost. Greek plus Algerian plus Montenegran plus Indian and Bosnian, Brazilian and Cypriot. But predominantly Greek. And this has become something else that I love about New York.

The House of Lesbos

Enterprising ex-pat Greeks have transformed concepts I identify with ancient culture into items of modern American commerce. The trucks that read “Sparta Bakery” may for me evoke the macho warriors of the archaic city-state, but they also give Sparta a new and oddly domesticated twist.

There’s a butcher’s (not pictured) that dangles skinned lambs on hooks at its window in a way that is not entirely edifying to the vegetarian eye, but somehow, especially around Easter time (after which, for a week, all the suspended corpses mysteriously disappear) seems quite Greek.

There are numerous entities that I simply don’t understand — the Lesbiake Stege for instance (Lesbian House?) or the mysterious Pansamian Brotherhood of Pythagoras, some kind of presumably philosophical (or bean-eating?) community group, which has been around since 1913 as opposed to the 8th century BCE. There’s Plato’s, an establishment I cycle past often, but can’t quite figure out.

Then there’s Zenon Taverna — the word means friend/stranger — a delectable restaurant run by an older Greek gentleman who gets his adult children to do the table-waiting. I dined there last weekend and it was delicious: most of the dishes featured cheese, with some form of potato accompanying every meal. It’s absolutely charming and satisfyingly homey, in a very Greek, family way.

Here are some images of delightful Astoria Greekness; I’m throwing in a pic of MOMI (the Museum of the Moving Image), just because it’s cool.

[Part if my lazy-girl's "daily" series of what I love about New York]

Pythagorean Brotherhood

Plato's -- ?

Greek olives

Golden Greek coffee (actually it says Cypriot)

Special yoghurt and olive oil, sent by gods for $9.95

Who could dislike a mythical beer?

Ouzo-flavoured soda

MOMI: also in Astoria

Paranoid though the Rapture was — or perhaps beautifully misled — it’s not the only manifestation of imbalance evident in New York. After midnight I walked towards the N train from my party along 7th Avenue in Manhattan, past posters filled with complaints about the mistreatment, by the FBI, of those who assert that 9/11 was a government conspiracy.

And just to prove that a similar sentiment exists in Queens, too, I include a snap I took last week of a van outside my house on May 13 2011, belonging, surely, to a visiting Republican (or Libertarian?). I haven’t seen it since.

I always thought I was a little paranoid. Life in a small city like Dublin can do that to you, since, in truth, you’ll always know someone who knows someone who knows something about you. In New York, nobody knows anything about anyone: but that makes no difference. In urban anonymity, such sentiments thrive — and, who’s to say; they may some of the time be right. I’m just glad they weren’t this time round.

That shadowy figure is me.

The end of the world, as advertised on subways. Photo credit: Niall McKay

Planned Parenthood is in its own words “a trusted healthcare provider” which “has promoted a commonsense approach to women’s health and well-being” for more than 90 years. It’s a pretty amazing organization, headed up by a glamorous and inspiring woman, and it offers what in European countries what might seem pretty ordinary: basic affordable healthcare for women and men. But in the US, that’s an incredibly brave thing to do. Remember Dr. George Tiller? (Note: He didn’t actually work for PP).

I’m writing about it as part of my Best of NY series because US healthcare and insurance are enormously complex and expensive, and without Planned Parenthood, I’d have nowhere to go. Honestly, although easy access to these clinics is one of the goods of New York, the so-called healthcare system (industry?) is a massively, toxically bad aspect of life in the US, and this topic should really be on a worst of list.

It’s not only impecunious freelance writers who don’t have health insurance. I interned for a while at a prestigious media company which I cannot name because I signed a non-disclosure agreement. One day a colleague told me she was going to Planned Parenthood for a check-up. I was shocked, as I had assumed that health insurance would have come with her job, but she told me that because her part of the company wasn’t unionized, the employees had no real rights. They all worked as freelancers, even though they came in to work 360 days per year. The company had few obligations towards them, and certainly none regarding costly healthcare coverage.

My colleague was a beautiful, intelligent, married and highly educated young woman, and she said the experience of attending the New York clinic was much better than she’d expected. In the mid-west (or wherever she was from, all I remember is that it wasn’t NY or CA) she would have had to walk past protestors accusing her of being a murderer, just for going in the door. That was not too long before Tiller’s killing.

These days attacks against Planned Parenthood are ongoing, in a more-or-less non-violent form. Earlier this year a creepy but photogenic activist called Lila Rose arranged a sting in the Bronx, videoing a Planned Parenthood receptionist giving advice to a pimp and underage girl. The employee reported it to her boss as soon as the pair left, but, of course, that doesn’t feature in the film. And the right is making a vicious assault on the organization’s funding, framed as part of the budget cuts. According to Dan Savage (who writes the column Savage Love), “Indiana’s right-wing Republican governor signed a bill into law that strips Planned Parenthood in that state of federal funds.” This afternoon I got a message from Planned Parenthood in my inbox entitled “Not in New York” — “Today, a bill was introduced in the New York State Assembly that would defund Planned Parenthood.”

Happily, some of the attacks have a truly comedic value, as when a US senator, Jon Kyl, claimed that abortions made up 90% of procedures at the clinics. When it emerged that abortions comprise only 3% of Planned Parenthood’s activities, he said that his comment was “not intended to be a factual statement.”

So this is getting away a little from why I’m writing about Planned Parenthood. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve made a number of trips there for checkups — it’s been rather alarming to need them but luckily everything seems to be fine. All I can say is that my visits were fairly uneventful, and with an organization as embattled as this one, that’s probably a rather astonishing thing.