little view

I.
By three I could not think.

It is wonderful to have an office again, but it is windowless - I am a long way from my glass aerie in Berlin - and I find myself craving sunlight and air that smells of other than hours-old tea bags.  Better than a coffee is a garden: so I walked over to St. Luke's in the Fields on Hudson Street.

The west side of Manhattan has a number of these quasi-public green spaces: my old neighbor, the Episcopal Seminary in Chelsea, also comes to mind, its interior park surrounding the Chapel open just often enough to be welcoming, closed just often enough to feel like a secret.


II.
The most charming thing about the West Village must be its irregularity - the crooked streets, the maximalist intersections, townhouses at odd angles to their own lots - so that, whoever you are, you may always feel as though the West Village is something that you are just discovering.*

I could not tell you the number of times I walked down Barrow Street past this garden, and in all those years, it seems, I never went inside.  I would have claimed that I could guide you past every shutter and stoop from West Street to Sixth Avenue, that I could remember every storefront and restaurant, and be able to people them all with nights out and meals eaten and drinks drunk; and I could do the same along my route to Chelsea.  I could trace my own footsteps in these neighborhoods the way people recite their favorite lines of movie dialogue.  But the truth is that my memory rushes down ever-deeper channels, and when I test myself - say, the view south from Hudson and Barrow - and I look down Hudson in my mind, I see the streets south of Leroy fade into pinstripe grey, two exit lanes for the Tunnel, then nothing at all.





III.
You could go north just one block, and peer longingly against the fenced courtyard on Grove Street; but that gate won't ever open for you.  Just to the west is the St. Luke's garden, composed of two irregular squares hinged together, the first divided in four with a cleverly tilted axis, so that you first step into a sort of foyer.  An interior wall of shrubs buffers the sound and sight of trucks outside, though this stretch of Hudson is so close to the Tunnel that you cannot really say that the city outside disappears.  Inserted in the middle is another square lined with benches; you may follow the diagonal paths that cut through it into the second half of the garden, or stop and pull out your book, as women all around me did.

The Chelsea garden show may have made the world safe for dahlias, again, but one suspects that here at St. Luke's, dahlias never went out.  It is not a stylish garden, and maybe it shouldn't be.  You could make it more fashionable, but you would lose something.  There's something to be said for a garden that's humble, that knows its purpose.  It is a little ramshackle, a little amateur: it expresses its community's needs as much as it does an intended design.  The general structure, the bones, are there, of course, but the selection of plants feels willful, and some are chosen to memorialize gardeners past.  In the spring, it must be a garden of cherry blossom trees and azaleas; now past bloom were iris, crepe myrtles, and hollyhocks.  Coreopsis was a cloud of spent seed-heads.  Still blooming were the dahlias and asters and the indefatigable butterfly bush.  Tucked beneath the azlaeas was wild ginger, a satisfying, glossy deep green with dinner-plate shaped leaves.

In the late afternoon sun, the autumn plants came into their own.  Climbing hydrangea thickly covered the roof of a brick outbuilding, like frosting on a gingerbread house, and entwined with the red leaves of another vine.  Viburnum was backlit purple, and the oval leaves of the smokebush glowed like coals.

The benches filled with mothers and grandmothers watching as schoolgirls, newly released, pulled out their homework.  A single nun found meaning in a brick wall topped with vine.

It's hard to find a place that's hidden and quiet and yet open to a stranger, one that lets each entrant feel as though she can shut the door behind herself.  - Quiet, humble.  Better than a coffee.



*And it's true that even when you live there, you'll often notice some street or building that you've mysteriously never seen before.   Weehawken Street? we asked each other, several years ago.  We had walked by it uncountable times on the way to the renovated Christopher Street pier, but somehow we had never gone down Weehawken Street itself.  Where had this strange movie set come from?  We proceeded gingerly, as though it had, in fact, been plucked from New Jersey and dropped by aliens next to the highway.