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Tuesday, May 20th, 2003
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8:30p - Summer's Beginning
I have been living in my new room since Thursday evening. It is located on the fourth story of a six-story walk up on West 152nd Street, in a neighborhood that my new 5-Borough Street Atlas calls Sugar Hill. The neighborhood is between Harlem and Washington Heights and has characteristics of both.
My room is just the right size to fit a good measure of my books, my computer, and all the clothes that I need this summer. I am storing the rest of my stuff at Manhattan Mini-Storage. It doesn't have its own phone line yet, but that will change between three days and two weeks after tomorrow morning, when Verizon receives (and hopefully can read this time) giant photocopies of my driver's license and debit card. Apparently they need to "protect against fraud." It doesn't have a shower, but I can take a bath. Baths get me cleaner anyway, because I have to work at it. It doesn't have a drain plug, but three or four paper towels work fine (and I could probably buy one at the 99¢ store that has nearly as much variety as a Duane Reade (or Eckerd for my Missouri readers). It doesn't have three-pronged outlets, but I bought an adapter for a dollar at the ferretería. Scarily, they had a poster up supporting Joaquín Balaguer for president. He was a repressive and brutal leader, though nowhere near to the extent of his mentor Trujillo.
Besides working, I've done some exploring. Took Dave on a tour of Queens, partly going along the same route as the one I took with the urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum, partly exploring new territory. We walked around Flushing, Flushing Meadows Park, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Woodside. Unfortunately, my idea for an alternate history where the UN stays under the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park (near what is now Shea Stadium) instead of moving to Manhattan is a non-starter. According to The Power Broker, Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, those at the UN responsible for choosing the site were planning on choosing Philadelphia or Boston if New York wouldn't give them at least a planned site in Manhattan. They didn't actually move to Kips Bay until later, but it was already in the works.
I think I will wait until I know how long it will be before I get the phone line to blog again, rather than waiting until I get the phone line. I will probably blog tomorrow to either complain or rejoice.
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