Return To Moote Pointe

158 Return To Moote Pointe

A recent trip back to Moote Pointe NY, just outside New York City. And some observations:

Frangipanni bought the building that formerly housed the Secret Seaside Laboratory for this series and earlier for Bloomberg On The Weekend Radio. Frangipanni cut off the top, put in a second floor and posted a “for sale by owner sign.” He overpayed, though at the time he thought he was getting a bargain, which – at the time – he was.

Nice job of paving the driveway.

Roast-O-Rama around the corner has closed and turned into a pizza joint, one of six in walking distance. Roast-O-Rama was best known for its Arby-like roast beef sandwiches and its pretty Hispanic counter workers who spoke no English but did so with flirtatious grace.

Routes 27 and 27a in Nassau County have become soul brethren to the Cross Bronx expressway, only with less experienced drivers. Glacial.

The one Long Island Railroad train observed was 12 minutes late. Glacial – and with new horror stories about people falling through the gap between the platform and the rail car. The problem is as old as the railroad itself, about 170 years. But people are starting to pay attention. About the right amount of time for the LIRR’s problem solvers, the ones who survey you endlessly and then do nothing.

New York City itself has become Paradise on earth. Some samples: You can drive the length of Riverside Drive and never see a human being. Just trees and Grant’s Tomb. Oh, and some stray dogs.

All the people who coagulate at 133^rd and 12^th are still there, though. There’s what passes in Harlem for a supermarket there. It’s kind of like Whole Foods Soul Food.

Everyone speaks English or Spanish or a mix of both. Everyone goes about his business.

Flushing is another story. No English here.

The Mandarin speakers are all busy dissing the Cantonese speakers who are all busy dissing the Korean speakers in parking lots with no parking spaces and no room to walk, adjacent to streets teeming with people going in every direction at once.

What ever happened to “keep right?”

One Mandarin speaker liked the street scene to an invasion of cockroaches, which she calls cokka-rohchiz. Reminding her that she was once one of them, and before that in Taipei which is even busier.

What’s changed in New York? Probably nothing. It looks a little cleaner than remembered. It’s more crowded than it should be. But that’s not new.

It still doesn’t have a school system worth the pomposity it floats on.

And can you believe they’re fiddling around, still, with the Trade Center site?

This department has always said that the only fitting memorial is to leave the place as it landed.

That is a pipe dream. Ain’t no money in that. No architects imposing their nightmares on the public at public expense. No builders replacing one hideous pair of monster buildings with another.

No landlord. No tenants. Just memories.

Terrible concept.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2006 WJR