To the island

WEEK 52

The earth looked still as our plane from San Francisco landed in Newark a few days ago. It was Tuesday rush hour, but the highways were mostly bare. Parking lots sat empty. So did the airport gates, plane-less bridges to nowhere fanning out, one beside the other. I held a long inhale. It was a palpable stillness.

In the middle of April, I silently wished to be in New York City on my birthday. I then said my wish aloud to my wife, and we contemplated — then plotted — a safe and responsible journey. It was not so much for the birthday itself; I have never been one for celebrations. No, my desire was to come full circle with my year-long project. A return to our island.

This final week has been a homecoming of sorts. At different points during lockdown, Irena and I have longed to be in our adopted city of the past five plus years. The solidarity with neighbors. The chance to support local restaurants. Wanting to cheer and clap at 7:00 p.m. every night along with all New Yorkers, honoring the healthcare heroes. Irena and I always say that home is wherever in the world we are together in each moment, but more often than not these past few years, NYC has been our center of gravity. And we were feeling its pull.

Before this week’s journey, we braced ourselves for a city changed. And walking through our beloved Washington Square Park on Wednesday afternoon, I felt a little heartbroken. The city is at its most glorious: trees tall and full, and flowers everywhere. There is this thing that happens in New York in May, where sunlight really does dapple the sidewalks, peeking through the leafy green. I don’t know this light anywhere else.

Yet as we sat on a bench in the park, I could sense that people here have been in pain. The hum of the city has dimmed. On any given day, Washington Square Park is filled with drummers, poets, chalk artists, jugglers, human statues, people dancing, the guy playing a grand piano, someone making soap-bubbles the size of small children, painters and jazz trios. Well, any given day before now, that is. Yes, some people were out, picnicking on the grass, the NYU grads snapping photos in front of the arch and empty fountain. But all around us, we saw a masked world with too much empty space.

We had come to the park to weigh an idea for my 52-and-final first: What if I set up a sign and gather a few strangers, properly socially distanced of course, and conduct my first-ever public reading of my writing? It’s a cool thought and I am game to try, but best for a less sober time…

Instead, on this last day before my next birthday, I decided that we will make a necessary and important pilgrimage across the East River to visit a place that has been part of our life just about every day for the past four years. A place that, for us, is at once mythical and real, if that is even possible. We are going to The Lot Radio.

For the rest of this post to make sense, I need to rewind.

Music brought me to Irena. One week into senior year of high school, I got up the nerve to audition to play piano in the school jazz band, not considering that my future wife had long held that position. Turns out there was room for both of us on the piano bench that year. Irena is unequivocally the better pianist and musician — that is not even up for debate. But I too have “big ears” (an old jazz expression) as we will sometimes say. And so, music has been, is now, and always will be, central to our happiness.

Fast forward several decades. After moving part-time to Manhattan, we fell into the local music and club scene, dancing into the wee hours, often at Burner parties, and starting to form our go-to list of favorite DJs. And in some great timing kismet, Irena discovered The Lot Radio just as it started broadcasting early in 2016.

The Lot Radio is exactly what those words mean — a radio station (that happens to be in a shipping container) on a lot (that happens to be in Williamsburg) — and so much more. I am not exaggerating when I say that The Lot — specifically, the music played by the DJs who show up 24×7 for their two-hour sets — has streamed through our speakers and on our TV nearly every day since. It is mostly music we enjoy, but not always. That is fine. Because when you listen to The Lot Radio, you realize the expansiveness of music. It may as well be air, all around us, all the time.

We were long overdue for a visit.

Our chosen day was a bluebird stunner. Comfortable temperature. Just perfect. We gathered up the now standard don’t-leave-home-without items (face coverings and hand sanitizer that is) and headed outside, first walking south through Nolita, then east on Delancey and over the Williamsburg Bridge, followed by a left turn north on Bedford to our destination at 17 Nassau Avenue, Brooklyn:

But first, an observational tangent: Walking around the city these past few days has been revelatory. Block after block we thought we knew, but didn’t. As we strolled on people-less sidewalks (not marching in battle as it used to be) along streets with very few parked cars and minimal moving traffic to distract the eye, everything was revealed. Metalwork. Stonework. Arched windows. The fonts used in building names. Rooftops. Carvings and emblems. Mini parklets. Vistas down side streets. And I am a person who long ago perfected the ability to walk at pace while still looking up for inspiration. But there I was, retracing steps I had made many times over, and it felt like each was a new discovery.

As we approached the lot (The Lot!), we heard music playing — and myth and reality converged in just the right way.

The coffee stand was open, but the lot seating area closed (until better times, said the barista). During the pandemic, the DJs have been doing their thing from their homes but still broadcasting in their weekly slots, sometimes the live webcam atop the container picking up scenes of the neighborhood. And so we sat for a while in the sun on a bench and listened, becoming part of the scene.  

I love the origin story of The Lot Radio. It is one of those New York tales that gives me hope for what could be on the other side of all we are going through.

The man who founded it would commute by this small, triangular, empty lot basically used for refuse (which happens to have a view of the Empire State Building in the distance), when one day he saw a for lease sign. He says in that moment he envisioned an online radio station that could be home to the amazingly broad DJ and music scene around the city, and also an outdoor space (albeit tiny) for people to gather. One reclaimed shipping container later — half of it housing the broadcasting studio and the other half a coffee house to sustain the whole venture — and his vision came to life, a tiny lot for big creativity and endless joy.

And so … with The Lot Radio as my soundtrack, I say goodbye to 52 and look forward.