Painting and Essay by Robert Beck
We Upper West Siders are walkers, and that reflects in the businesses that cater to our spur-of-the-moment needs and appetites.
The backbone of the neighborhoods is the corner bodega. They have those things you don’t know you are out of yet. You can find the stores every half-dozen blocks or so, each in clairvoyant anticipation of that list in your pocket or what’s about to pop up on a text from your spouse. Capers? Batteries? Excedrin? Nothing keeps UWS domestic life ticking like the corner bodega. And they have flowers.
You can find plenty of places to satisfy that craving for bagels, ice cream, muffins, and pizza, and we have the best hot dogs in the world. Or shop for jewelry, eyeglasses, more eyeglasses, yarn, or hardware. Check out the canes and umbrellas while your shoes are being fixed. Buy a hot cup of coffee on every block. Pray, read, get a haircut, watch the big game over a beer…that’s just a portion of the depth and variety in the 15 blocks I walk to and from my studio. You used to be able to get your lamp fixed across the street, but that’s gone. (Not sure what I’ll do now. If you see a guy walking up Amsterdam with a six-foot torchiere under his arm, knocking on doors, say hello.)
We’ve got parks, we’ve got gyms. We’ve got groomers, exercisers, toys, and stores with food just for your dog. Need some hand-made single-batch wrapping paper? It’s hard to choose.
It can get frenetic out on the sidewalk amidst all that expectation. Bicycles and scooters zip through the cityscape, immune to traffic laws and sometimes seemingly to those of physics. I can only imagine if the trend had been toward jetpacks instead of electric bikes (Citirocket!) — the black and pale blue smudges on the sides of buildings. We have the carts and the mini-distribution centers on the avenues to navigate. If it is the age of anything, it’s the age of delivery.
One thing I rarely take advantage of is the local multiplex theater. I go to a movie maybe once every three years. It was an adjustment to find myself watching a film at nine o’clock on Christmas Eve morning last year— a Tuesday — but I suppose that’s part of the “city that never sleeps” portfolio.
Theaters have come a long way; it’s not your grandfather’s movie house. Now it’s plush seats, and your choice of wine or Voodoo Ranger IPA. I couldn’t find any Good & Plentys, which was disappointing, but not great for breakfast anyway. And nobody told me I should come twenty minutes after the official starting time to avoid being pummeled by previews with crash-n-bang screaming fireballs and talking animals. The feature was another two hours and forty minutes of much the same. Blinking and exhausted, I stumbled back into the sunlight, and it was only noon. Fortunately, I wasn’t far from a French bakery.
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See more of Robert Beck’s work and visit his UWS studio at www.robertbeck.net. Let him know if you have a connection to an archetypical UWS place or event that would make a good West Side Canvas subject. Thank you!
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What I miss is the former streetscape of Broadway, where a Gracious Home, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and Best Buy made it possible to get ANYthing you needed without making a long trip. Really miss them.
Gracious Home, BB & B, and Best Buy (which didn’t have much) weren’t exactly in the neighborhood for long. All were in buildings that went up within the last 30 years, two went up within the last 20.
I was going to say. Lyter’s and Radio Shack provide all that decade before those stores appeared
I’m not familiar with what Lyter’s was, was it a hardware store? Because to its credit Gracious Home had things many other hardware (not houseware) stores don’t sell. However, Gracious Home wasn’t on the UWS for very long.
As usual, wonderful painting and essay.
I remember this painting being done. We are looking South along Amsterdam Avenue from the SW corner of 82nd and Amsterdam. Well done!
You know, there’s this story by John Cheever, “The Swimmer” (made into good movie with Burt Lancaster), about a man who goes from pool to pool that “make a river back to his home.” Someone could make the same kind of movie about moving along the stream of coffee houses burgeoning around us. And they could make it with a phone.
I have a small painting that is of a building on Broadway that was painted from the view of the old J & H Bagel shop . It was done by a known artist as well. Simon Parkes. Would for you to show it. The building is still there.
Do you mean H&H Bagels on the SW corner of Broadway & 80th?
Yes, please, Rachel.
It isn’t the building across Zabar’s, is it? That one was where the school that the painter, William Merritt Chase established which became the predecessor of Parsons School of Design.