On a wet spring morning, an previous cherry tree was starting to blossom in a little bit park alongside Cherry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Several protesters surrounded the tree to guard it from the New York City staff who have been about to chop it down. Police officers moved in, arrested the activists, and the sound of a sequence noticed stuffed the air. The tree went down.
“There it goes, the last cherry tree on Cherry Street,” mentioned the 72-year-old poet Eileen Myles, who stood within the drizzle bearing witness to the scene. “There’s been cherry trees here for hundreds of years. But not anymore.”
For greater than a yr, Myles, the writer of greater than 20 books of poetry, fiction and essays, together with the cult-hit novel “Chelsea Girls,” has been an ardent crusader within the struggle between a bunch of Lower East Side residents and town’s powers that be. At situation is the contentious demolition of East River Park, the 50-odd acre city waterfront inexperienced house that runs alongside the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, and the cherry tree was chopped right down to accommodate town’s plans.
Myles, who makes use of the pronoun “they” and was carrying tinted spectacles, frivolously ripped denims and a brown trucker’s cap, took an image of the arboreal carnage with their cellphone and posted it on Instagram, the place they’ve greater than 30,000 followers.
“The trees have been talking to each other,” they mentioned. “They’ve been talking through their roots. This tree knew this was coming.”
The metropolis began tearing down East River Park final yr as a part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, a plan that goals to enhance the realm’s flood safety capabilities. Once the present park is demolished, town plans to lift it eight to 10 ft by protecting it with landfill, in impact constructing it anew.
The activists don’t dispute the necessity for some form of climate-driven motion, however they oppose town’s technique of razing a park beloved to generations of Lower East Siders who admire its scruffy athletic fields, rusty barbecue pits and concrete chess tables.
Huddled beside Myles within the rain was Sarah Wellington, an artist in her 30s who wore a Democracy Now! tote bag and took video of the employees together with her cellphone. “We believe these cherry trees were between 80 and 100 years old,” she mentioned. “This is Indigenous land that was stolen back in 1643 and now it’s happening all over again.”
“I didn’t know so much about Eileen Myles until recently,” she added, “but I know Eileen is a bolt of lightning. You should see Eileen run.”
The prior morning, Myles was arrested after that they had dashed throughout the identical website in an try and defend a tree from getting chopped down. They ended up spending a lot of the day on the close by Seventh Precinct. “You need the time to get arrested and I had little to do yesterday,” they mentioned. “But it felt good to get arrested. This is civil disobedience.”
These days, Myles enjoys the standing of esteemed downtown New York cultural determine. Their profession has included a poetry assortment revealed on a mimeograph machine within the Nineteen Seventies and a memoir funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship in recent times, and they’re now typically stopped on the road by younger and deferential writers who want to categorical appreciation for the work Myles produced in a grittier metropolis that lives on solely in fable. Protecting that vanishing New York is a part of the rationale Myles has develop into one the park’s guardians.
A resident of the identical rent-stabilized East Village condominium for the reason that Nineteen Seventies, Myles toiled on the margins for many years earlier than experiencing a mainstream revival upon the 2015 reissue of their 1994 autobiographical novel, “Chelsea Girls.” It gained new admirers, instantly showing tucked inside tote baggage at bookish Brooklyn espresso retailers, and a personality primarily based on the writer appeared on the present “Transparent.”
But all through the years of obscurity and literary fame, East River Park was the author’s reliable city oasis. Myles scribbled poems whereas smoking cigarettes and sitting on its benches. They stretched their legs on the identical tree for 40 years earlier than happening runs. And in the course of the bleakest chapters of the pandemic they discovered solace by watching the river.
So when town engaged its plan, Myles sprang into motion. They’ve used their appearances at literary occasions to broadcast the message they usually wrote an impassioned essay defending the park for Artforum. They have organized a march that introduced out New Yorkers like Chloë Sevigny and Ryan McGinley, they usually helped discovered an activist group, “1000 people 1000 trees.” And though the demolition is nicely underway, they’ve protested persistently on the website, snapping footage of chain-saw-wielding staff to publish on Instagram with captions like “Tree killer.”
Thunk.
Thomp.
After the final of the cherry tree was thrown right into a chipper, staff started mowing down a London aircraft, and its hacked limbs have been now cascading to the bottom. One activist let unfastened a harrowing shriek. Myles locked arms with three protesters and began chanting to the tree.
“Things that might have once been corny to me don’t feel corny anymore,” Myles mentioned as they started peddling their bike again to the East Village. “Ever since this all started for me over a year ago it has become my heart. My girlfriend at the time told me, ‘I feel I’ve lost you to the park.’”
The demolition of East River Park, which Robert Moses constructed within the Thirties, dates again to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when Lower Manhattan was devastated by flooding.
The F.D.R. Drive grew to become a part of the East River, and there was an explosion on the Con Ed plant on 14th Street that created a blackout. Older residents of the general public housing tasks that encompass the park, together with Baruch Houses and the Jacob Riis Houses, have been trapped of their buildings for days due to the deluge. Implementing flood safety into Lower Manhattan grew to become a precedence, and town’s consideration turned to East River Park.
Initially, there was a plan that the activists wholeheartedly supported. It proposed {that a} big berm be constructed alongside the positioning’s western facet, counting on East River Park as a pure sponge, with out the necessity of radically altering the park itself. In 2018, nonetheless, when the de Blasio administration was anticipated to finalize the undertaking, town declared that plan infeasible and moved ahead with its present technique. Many neighborhood members have been outraged. An opposition group, East River Park Action, sued town final yr however has been largely unsuccessful in court docket.
“We’re certainly familiar with Eileen Myles and have seen what they think of and have written about the park,” mentioned Ian Michaels, a spokesman for town’s Department of Design and Construction. “The protesters have their right to protest. The timeline was affected by some lawsuits but the project is continuing.”
Some of the phone-wielding activists have needed to deal with accusations that they’re practising the model of civic selfishness that goes by the time period Nimby-ism. “Some have said we’re just white lefty tree-huggers,” Myles mentioned. “How is it that after 44 years here, though, I’m still just an interloper?”
On the latest spring morning, as metropolis staff chopped down the Cherry Street bushes, a longtime resident of a close-by housing advanced, Elizabeth Ruiz, 55, was strolling her Shih Tzu previous the protesters. Known within the neighborhood as DJ Dat Gurl Curly, Ms. Ruiz carried out home and disco units on the park’s amphitheater for years till the band shell was bulldozed final December.
“At the end of the day, I’m not so mad at gentrification and change,” she mentioned. “But I don’t get why they have to destroy the trees and everything else in the park. If you knock down a tree here, then you knock me down, too.”
After the bike journey again to the East Village, Myles sat right down to breakfast at Veselka and started reminiscing about coming to New York at age 24 within the Nineteen Seventies with aspirations of turning into a poet — a time when the very notion of town pumping cash right into a ramshackle downtown park would have been farcical.
Myles, who grew up in a working-class Roman Catholic family close to Boston, discovered the scene they have been looking for within the previous East Village church that homes the Poetry Project. There they befriended greats like Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg, and writers smoked cigarettes within the again rooms whereas they talked craft. To make the lease, Myles waited tables on the Tin Palace, a jazz and poetry membership on the Bowery, and labored as a librarian, a bouncer, a motorcycle messenger and a clerk at Bleecker Bob’s, the Greenwich Village file retailer. Driving round city in a pink truck whereas working for a radical lesbian newspaper distribution firm, additionally they delivered stacks of homosexual male pornography magazines and music publications.
“When I finally got here I was like, ‘Wait, you mean this city is actually real?’” Myles mentioned. “Bob Dylan was here. Andy Warhol was here. Everyone who drove a cab was writing a novel. Every waitress was a dancer. It was astonishing to me that people in New York were actually who they said they were.”
In the Eighties, because the AIDS disaster ravaged downtown New York, Myles watched as shut associates died. Spurred to embrace sobriety, Myles shaped a bond with the park: jogging previous litter and needles alongside the East River at nightfall, they blasted Maria Callas singing “Aida” on a Walkman to honor an opera-loving pal who had died of the illness.
“I stopped drinking and drugging, and that’s when I began running in the park,” Myles mentioned. “It became my ritual and has remained so for years. It became my tool for sanity. The park became the best writing studio I’ve ever been in.”
As Myles sees it, the park can be a downtown time capsule, a inexperienced city break that preserves a metropolis that has all however perished.
“There was time to make lots of mistakes back then,” Myles mentioned. “There was time to waste, and that’s the thing everybody deserves. And the park is wasted space. Uncontrolled vernacular space. So the city said, ‘This can’t be.’”
After Myles left Veselka, they obtained prepared to talk on the Strand bookstore that night with the novelist Colm Tóibín. During the occasion, they talked about their struggle for the park. The subsequent day, they have been off to Marfa, Texas, the place that they had purchased a house some years in the past. They can be becoming a member of their rescue pit bull, Honey, and ending an task for The New Yorker; within the story, they supposed to sneak in a reference to the park.
In reality, the park now seeps into Myles’s work consistently, particularly the poetry. A latest poem, “120 Years and What Did You See,” ends like this:
I lookup, you’re shaking
assembly, you’re larger you’re wiser you’re stronger
than me, and at all times can be. Each of us strolling
round and blessing
you immediately
And you
will at all times
be TREE
Recommend
