Upper West Siders, Saving the Day

By Yvonne Vávra

This week, you’ve all been heroes. Because I made you heroes.

You might be thrilled to know that I’m always out here looking at you. I walk around getting excited about who I imagine you are. What are you up to? How are you making it through life? But inspired by City & State New York’s annual Unsung Heroes list, which celebrates the people behind the decision-makers, the ones getting things done just outside the spotlight, this week I started looking at you and wondering about all the ways you save the day, every day. I know you do. But where’s your spotlight?

And then it hit me. Or almost hit me, because I was saved. A couple came toward me with an SUV of an umbrella, one of those golf umbrellas that could keep a small wedding dry. Side rant: What’s up with that? Claiming an unthinkable amount of air rights for your tiny head?

Given that this was an Upper West Side–sized sidewalk, there was no getting around the thing, and I was about to be poked in the ear had the man not tilted it at the last minute. What a hero. It was enough civic decency to make up for the fact that he had been part of the decision—or, at the very least, hadn’t prevented his partner from bringing a beach umbrella onto the sidewalk.

It’s these tiny heroic contributions that last only seconds but save us from falling apart. It’s not easy being one of about 29,000 New Yorkers per square mile. It helps when someone tells you your backpack is open or puts a chair back where it belongs. It’s comforting to see, as I did a few weeks ago, a young man catch a plastic bag that was flying in the wind down 86th Street. For him and his friends, the joy and pride were all about jumping up and catching it, but he still threw it in the trash afterward. Street saved.

There’s another special category of heroes saving the day: those who do it by not making things worse. All you Upper West Siders who don’t honk when you don’t need to, don’t block the subway exit, don’t stretch your dog leash across the sidewalk, and don’t abandon your shopping cart in the exact spot where you stopped needing it: Thank you! I applaud the restraint. What a heroic way to be a New Yorker.

And another kind of hero deserves a song, uh, a whole concert. An epic opera, really. The champions who are saving us minutes. They hold the elevator door, already know our order at the bodega, warn us not to get into that one line at Fairway that’s not been moving, or save our place in line while we grab something we forgot.

Some people save us three minutes, others save half a century for us. Upper West Sider Taylor Hosking is keeping a nearly forgotten part of our neighborhood’s history alive, and soon we’ll get to see the results of her efforts. Hosking grew up at 93rd and Columbus, and every summer, she’d watch the Puerto Rican flag go up on a light pole from her childhood bedroom window. Flying the flag from that pole has been a longtime tradition, a way of saying, “We’re here, and we belong,” in a neighborhood that has changed drastically since the 1970s and ’80s. In the documentary West Side Familia, her feature-film debut, Hosking shines a light on the history of the Black and Puerto Rican community of the Upper West Side and the political and sometimes neighborly efforts to push it out. “Because a lot of people think the neighborhood’s always been this wealthy, liberal, predominately white neighborhood it’s known to be in popular culture. But that’s far from the truth,” Hosking says in the trailer.

When I walked by the pole this week, the wind had played a little too roughly with the flag, twisting it tightly around the pole and practically hiding it. But soon, the story behind it will be impossible to miss, and Hosking will get the spotlight she deserves when West Side Familia premieres at the New York Latino Film Festival on September 16.

I was saved one more time this week. On Tuesday, I was walking on 77th Street, by the museum, when a jogger flew past me, weaving around me like a skier through slalom poles, and I was the pole. I smelled what I did not want to smell, and my horrified mind insists I felt her sweat on my skin. I was gearing up to give her a piece of my mind when another woman nearby yelled at her. I don’t remember what she said, but there were curses. Beautiful, glorious curses.

I stood there, relieved, amazed, and grateful. Someone else was fighting my fight. She saw a problem, stepped in, and saved my day. Made my day. I’m still singing her praises.