A Walk in the City
An Incomplete Tour
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
A random poem, written on a birthday years before, finds a new life when a series of interrelated profiles come together in a most unexpected way. This is what constitutes A Walk in the City, writer/poet Thomas Porky McDonald’s New York City travelogue. A compilation of pieces written originally for an internal website at his workplace in New York City Transit, this volume shares brief, yet effective vignettes on a number of various sites in the City, some famous, others hardly on the radar. Dedicated to the average tourist and/or the lifetime New Yorker, McDonald’s love of the place he’s called home for his entire life comes across most vibrantly. Though the outer boroughs are touched upon transiently, this collection of “go to” sketches and reminisces is centered mainly in Manhattan, which – as any New Yorker knows – is the place that all those who live in Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island call “The City.” From the world famous sites, like the Empire State Building and Times Square, to hidden jewels like the New York City Transit Museum, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace or the New York City Fire Museum, A Walk in the City provides something for anyone seeking interesting pit stops in New York, whether planned ahead or merely in the course of a day already begun. The book is subtitled “An Incomplete Tour” since it is McDonald’s contention that no one could truly put every point of interest in The City into a single volume. Here, an unencumbered collection of articles attempts to send the reader out in search of something that cannot be explained without actually having the experience of being there. In any case, this is a City wanderers’ bonanza, one that should be considered by anyone who aspires to explore the diverse venues located in the greatest City in the world. In the Summer of 2012, the MTA Today, an internal website homepage, decided to run a series on New York City baseball. I was asked to write a few pieces for this series by Lisa Schwartz of Corporate Communications, which gathers and runs the contents of the page. She had previously used my work on two occasions, one a profile of my book, Poet in the Grandstand, for a series they ran on writers in Transit and the other about the recently opened 9/11 Memorial. For the baseball articles, Lisa had been sent my way by three good friends who are webmasters for MTA New York City Transit, Paula Alleyne, Olga Khrapovitski and Asya Muid. I was asked that each profile not exceed 450 words. To be honest, at first I felt this limitation afforded me a very small window to write about the things that I wanted to cover. In any case, I turned in four pieces, on Citi Field, the new Yankee Stadium, the Brooklyn Cyclones and a remembrance of Shea Stadium and the World’s Fair of 1964. My work was well received by Lisa and her department, so much so that they asked me if I could write more articles, about other New York-themed items. After kicking it around a bit, I agreed to do what were essentially mini-travelogues. The only prerequisites I was given were the original 450-word limit and that the final paragraph would give the reader directions to the particular site, via transit buses or trains. So off I went. One of the old adages that lifetime New Yorkers (like me) grow up hearing and later sharing is that so many of us don’t go to see many of the great places that The City has to offer, even though we live here. This is true, to varying degrees, as I know New Yorkers who have never even been to the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, three places you simply HAVE to go to if you are from New York City, in my opinion. This MTA Today assignment gave me the chance to explore New York City (which I had always walked the streets of throughout my life) in a much deeper way than I previously had done. I had long ago decided that by the time I retired, I would visit as many small and large New York sites as I could. Lisa Schwartz and the good folks at the MTA Today, notably Gene Ribeiro, Ann Steimel and Connie DePalma, the others who accepted my work, had escalated my timetable and given me a rare gift, one I would gratefully take advantage of. The one item that concerned me at first had been the 450-word limit. But as I began visiting different places and then writing the pieces about them, I found myself embracing the limit and using it as a great way to try and put the most information possible into the least possible words. These exercises in economy became an absolute joy and something I was very happy to share. At some point, I realized that these mini-travelogues could make a nice book. The title was easy enough to figure out, as I had quickly looked up a poem I had written many years earlier, one that I somehow knew I would use one day. A piece I wrote on my 36th birthday called “A Walk in the City,” seemed perfect for this project, even though the nature of the pieces that MTA Today requested was to give you the way around town by bus or subway. But I’ve always held that to truly appreciate The City (which meant Manhattan, of course), one needed to utilize the subways and city buses as merely a tool to hit the streets running (or walking, in this case). So to further justify this book’s title, I have added a “Walking Distance” add-on after each piece, as to what else is near a particular venue. For arguments sake, my idea of walking distance is about 10 city blocks or 4 avenues; that is the criteria I used here. Naturally, there is a fair amount of cross-sectioning that goes on, but I hope that the choice of going to a certain place might spread to other nearby attractions and/or curiosities, after reading each connecting list. While most to the pieces are based in Manhattan, outer boroughs are also represented. What follows are some 70 pieces that I wrote, which were then posted on the MTA Today homepage on the days noted at the end of each piece. The pieces are almost all presented exactly as they were printed on MTA Today, though on a few there have been minor small edits made. Some of the earlier pieces I wrote, particularly the museum spots, spoke in real time, as to what was appearing at a particular site at the time, or what I did while visiting there. One could accurately call them dated material, but I chose to balance the integrity of the original pieces with giving the reader what a trip to a particular place would feel like. Telling you about an exhibit that is long gone by now may seem useless to the reader, but I wanted to maintain how the original piece looked. The spirit of adventure at what might be showing now has to enter into the equation for these pieces. Also, most of the museum websites offer a “previous exhibits” area, where some of those that I saw are still alive, albeit electronically. (I even mention an exhibit I’d seen years before that is now on the website of the Museum of the City of New York.) Moreover, where my by-line originally was is replaced herein by the website of the venue, or an otherwise relevant website. For instance, on the piece on remembering Shea Stadium and the 1964-65 World’s Fair, I list the World’s Fair historical website. For the piece about the Cirque du Soleil show that I saw in a makeshift tent in the Citi Field parking lot, I use the Cirque’s website, so that one can see when the various new shows return to Citi Field or Radio City Music Hall, the two usual venues that the Cirque uses in this area. The piece on the pre-2013 All-Star Game MLB FanFest, which I went to with my baseball friends/Transit co-workers Arnold Greene, Janice Joe and Don Phu, uses the Javits Center website, the place where the FanFest was held. All the websites listed were active at the time this book was published.
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About the Book
A random poem, written on a birthday years before, finds a new life when a series of interrelated profiles come together in a most unexpected way. This is what constitutes A Walk in the City, writer/poet Thomas Porky McDonald’s New York City travelogue. A compilation of pieces written originally for an internal website at his workplace in New York City transit, this volume shares brief, yet effective vignettes on a number of various sites in the city—some famous, and others hardly on the radar. It is dedicated to the average tourist and/or the lifetime New Yorker. McDonald’s love of the place he’s called home for his entire life comes across most vibrantly.
Though the outer boroughs are touched upon transiently, this collection of go-to sketches and reminisces is centered mainly in Manhattan, which—as any New Yorker knows—is the place that all those who live in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island call “The City.”
From the world famous sites, like the Empire State Building and Times Square to hidden jewels like the New York City Transit Museum, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, or the New York City Fire Museum, A Walk in the City provides something for anyone seeking interesting pit stops in New York, whether planned ahead or merely in the course of a day already begun. The book is subtitled An Incomplete Tour since it is McDonald’s contention that no one could truly put every point of interest in the city into a single volume. Here, an unencumbered collection of articles attempts to send the reader out in search of something that cannot be explained without actually having the experience of being there. In any case, this is a city wanderers’ bonanza, one that should be considered by anyone who aspires to explore the diverse venues located in the greatest city in the world.
About the Author
Thomas Porky McDonald is a poet and writer who often comments on both baseball and life. His first six poetry collections, each of which contained five smaller volumes, spanned the 1990s on into the early twenty-first century. Ground Pork: Poems 1989–1994, Downtown Revival: Poems 1994–1997, Closer to Rona: Poems 1997–1999, Still Chuckin': Poems 1999–2002, In the Cameo Shade: Poems 2002–2005, and Vespers at Sunset: Poems 2005–2007 all presented a writer whose work was often distinguished by the use of baseball and the ballpark venue. Other previously published poetry came in the form of two thematic volumes, Diamond Reflections and Baseball Pieces for Real Fans, which takes the most vibrant baseball-related poems of the chronological collections from the many other life-related pieces contained in each five-book set, and Dem Poems: The Brooklyn Collection, born of verses written from 1985–2005, two decades when the writer’s jobsite was based in the borough of churches. Twenty-one years on the road visiting ballparks comes vibrantly alive in his most involved work, Poet in the Grandstand: An Enlightened Tour of Ballparks and the Places Where They Live. His book on poetic process, Does the Toy Cannon Fire Still at Night? cited sixty-two poems from his first three collections, giving the actual story behind each piece. Beyond the poetry landscape, his most recent book, the skipper’s scrapbook, was inspired by his own Queens upbringing and told the tale of two men and the journey they took together through the final season of their home ballpark, Shea Stadium. McDonald has also released Series Endings: A Whimsical Look at the Final Plays of Baseball’s Fall Classic, 1903–2003, a distinctly different view of baseball’s World Series than most mainstream histories; At a Loss to Eternity: Baseball Teams of Note That Didn’t Win it All, a celebration of great, non-Series winning teams; Never These Men: One Man’s Look at Baseball’s Creatively Cultured Characters, a biting rebuttal to the pervading need of the media to brand people for life; and Where the Angels Bow to the Grass: A Boy’s Memoir, which is taken mainly from the writer’s childhood days of the 1960s and 70s, describing the bond between McDonald and his father, Bill “The Chief” McDonald. He has also published a three-part anthology series, which includes An Irishman’s Tribute to the Negro Leagues, Over the Shoulder and Plant on One: An Irishman’s Tribute to Willie Mays, and Hit Sign, Win Suit: An Irishman’s Tribute to Ebbets Field. Each volume contains short stories, historical material, and a small dose of McDonald’s trademark baseball poetry. McDonald has also published a book of short stories, Paradise Oval, and his singular New Yorkers’ take on 9/11, The Air That September. Born in St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, McDonald has lived in nearby Astoria his entire life.