BOXES 10-11: under the GWB and around the Village.

This is my good friend David Hartwell, who will be showing up in quite a few later pictures. Where is he standing? First, some background. I met David at Colgate, where he was in the same Master's program as Toni and John (see "BOXES 8-9"). Part of our immediate friendship grew from his intense interest in science fiction (he had chosen Colgate mainly because Mark Hilligas, one of the first American academics specializing in SF, was in the English Department). I too was an SF fan, though I hadn't anywhere near David's background knowledge or devotion to promoting SF (and fantasy--I first heard about The Lord of the Rings from him, a year before the paperback editions made Tolkien world-famous). After he got his Master's David went on for his Ph.D. at Columbia, specializing in medieval literature, though he later became a leading SF book editor.

I've mentioned that my stay at Sidney's W. 86th St. apartment was thanks to David, who had moved out himself because he had gotten a work-scholarship: he became the manager of Bard Hall, the Columbia Medical School dormitory, part of the medical

complex on 168st St., 50 blocks north of the main campus. Besides tuition, he received lodging: a very spacious apartment with a balcony that overlooked the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge. In the top pic David is standing on his balcony ledge; I don't recall how far a drop it was.

On the day of these pictures we went for a walk down to the base of the GWB. (Sorry for the magenta cast of these photos: I've discovered that a few boxes--fortunately only a few so far--have discolored with age.) We started out by threading through the ramps leading from the West Side Highway and over to the shore:

The views directly under the bridge are dramatic, to say the least:

Besides the young women in the pic at the bottom right (or just preceding if you're viewing one-at-a-time), we encountered quite a variety of people: a group of bicyclers, a romantic couple, and most surprisingly, a painter:

On an earlier occasion, back in September, I went on a different sort of excursion with David and his girlfriend at the time, Natalie, to Macy's (when "Macy's" was simply the place on Herald Square). This seems to have been the first time I used the flash on my Instamatic.:

A friendly model, walking the aisles to show off the latest Macy's fashions, was willing to pose. And walking out of Macy's at the Herald Square entrance was always special because you looked up to see the Empire State Building:

In January 1967 I needed to move to another apartment, and was able to rent a room from a fellow graduate student, David Woodman, who had an apartment on W. 13th St., just east of Greenwich St. in the West Village. It was much farther from Columbia, but it was a great location in itself. My room was quite small--maybe 6'x8', barely room for a bed and a desk--but its window had a view of a little back yard below. In the pictures below, with and without flash, the decorations are David's; I can't remember if I ever replaced them with things of my own.

The living/common room wasn't all that large either, but it was pleasant. I see that John and Toni came for a visit at least once; in one pic Toni is looking at a slide viewer, maybe seeing the photos I took of them in Connecticut the preceding fall:

I don't remember the building having a roof garden, but the following pics look like they were taken from the roof:

I was just a block away from the Meatpacking District, long before it became a glamorous-grungy club scene:

Just a little farther west was the Hudson River, as you see below. I also took a picture of the street sign for a curious intersection: Little W. 12th St. and DeLamater Square. I cannot find the latter on Google Maps, but a 1928 article in The New Yorker refers to it being where 10th and 11th Avenues come together at the docks. Is the sign or the square still there?

The West Village has always been a great neighborhood for walks, and I see that on one spring day I was joined by Gary and Mary Gordon and David Hartwell:

I'll include one poorly lit pic of myself against an old wooden house:

We ran into a friend of mine during our walk--unfortunately I've forgotten her name. I also don't remember this fenced garden, but it seems to have been part of our walk:

I'll close this post with two shots of fire escapes, one winter, one spring. Next up with be visits to Cleveland and David Hartwell's family beach house in Massachusetts.