Brooklyn's Enchant Villages; NYC's Post Clocks
Remember your various grade-school reports on dead presidents, the ones with colored-pencil illustrations and yarn bindings, and your salt maps of North America and your shadow box for your book report on The Phantom Tollbooth? Well, let's say your name is Tony and you suffer a heart attack but you live through it and suddenly you want to share with everyone your vision of the world as a beautiful place. You embark on a project similar to those elementary-school dioramas but on a grander scale. You create the Eighth Not-So-Wonder of the World, the Enchant Villages. (It's actually the Enchanted Villages now: the "ed" was added later, in tiny letters, a concession to propriety.)
The Enchanted Villages is a unique worldview, a small universe behind chicken wire, set in a triangular space between two buildings in Greenpoint. Tony, the creator, put up a sign explaining the significance of it, as well as a poem and a plaque dedicating it to those who died at Pearl Harbor. He wanted to celebrate different cultures, and show the historical landmarks of different countries, but the result is somewhat less lofty, although no less entertaining. It's sort of a bizarre amalgam of cheap souvenirs and Amish doll figurines. For instance, Ireland is represented by two Irish coffee mugs and the Red Sea is a slimy fish tank full of stagnant water with a toy boat floating in it. Small, dirty plastic deer climb (according to the sign) Mount Ararat, and England is near the Vatican.
I first stumbled across this oddity when I moved to Williamsburg in 1990. I was wandering around the neighborhood, checking out this police station built in 1891, and there it was. It was early evening, and this little fountain was burbling in the fish tank, the string of Christmas lights was twinkling and it was really quite enchant. I used to bring people by to see it, and we all agreed it had a folk-art quality. You could feel the sincerity of Tony's mission to bring peace and understanding to all people. There was even a picture of Tony, along with some Brooklyn politician who visited his corner.
I had always planned on trying to get in touch with him, so I could interview him about the Enchant Villages, but a few years ago, there was another sign up on the chicken wire, one that said, "Tony: RIP." He died before I ever got a chance to talk to him, and after that the place lost a little of its sparkle. The plastic people fell over and no one put them back up again. The Christmas lights were doused. It just had a general air of decay. At one point, it seemed as if the display were getting smaller, and I imagined some of his relatives coming by and taking a piece here or there. (Like, "So, that's where that Irish coffee mug went. I always wondered where it was.")
One time, I walked by there and some guy was having a sad little garage sale in the shed next door, and it turned out to be Tony's son. He was full of stories about the old man, how he helped the son beat his heroin addiction when he got back from Vietnam, how he was going to restore the Enchant Villages to its former glory as a tribute to his father. Although I doubt it will be on the same scale as the restoration of Grand Central Station, I am certain the Villages will remain as enchant as ever.
Post Clocks
I used to like to have people meet me at out of the way places, like the Tiki Bar at the Hawaii Kai, the hat counter at Macy's, the last phone booth in the lobby of the Toy Building. Another good place was at this old, faded advertisement on the side of a building in Chinatown?it was for castor oil, with the tag line, "Children Cry for It." I bet they also used to run screaming into the night from it, but I guess that is not as catchy a slogan.
My all-time favorite, though, would have to be the clock in the sidewalk, near Wall St. (I think of it as the lowest clock in New York, and believe me, I know some pretty low ones.) It's an old-fashioned clock, embedded in the sidewalk under thick glass, in front of William Barthman Jewelers. One by one, though, my rendezvous spots started disappearing, so I figured I better get some new ones, preferably landmarked monuments that would be around for a while. Clocks seemed like a logical choice, such as the mechanized ones in the Central Park Zoo and the Schwarzenbach Building on Park Ave. S. and 32nd St. (something to watch while you're waiting), or the one near Herald Sq.
If you want ones that are hard to miss, though, you can't go wrong asking someone to hook up with you by one of the cast-iron post clocks. There are only eight of them left, but the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated them all as landmarks back in 1981. Four are in Manhattan, three are in Queens (although I doubt they appreciate them there?people in Queens are so tacky), and Brooklyn has just one.
Perhaps because it is the lone holdout in Brooklyn, the pedestal clock in front of 753 Manhattan Ave. holds a special place in my heart. It was probably manufactured by the Seth Thomas Company (the same company that made the clock in Grand Central Terminal), and installed around the turn of the century. Many of these post clocks stood in front of jewelers (in fact, they could actually be ordered from catalogs), and this one is no exception. It was a prominent advertisement for Bomelstein's Jewelers, until they packed up and hightailed it out of Greenpoint in the early 1980s. Incidentally, that is the last time the clock kept the correct time, but no matter. As Lewis Carroll used to say, a stopped clock is still correct twice a day. If you hit it at the right time, you could still meet people and actually go by the time on the clock, but your window of opportunity would be rather small.
If you look up the Seth Thomas Company, you can get a list of all the tower and post clocks they made and installed all over the United States and also in Europe. Just reading the names of the buildings where the ornate timepieces could once be found in New York City is like a roll call of a forgotten era: the Minsker Theater, the Corn Exchange Bank on W. 42nd St., the Cortlandt St. Ferry House, the New York Clipper Publication, the Power House for the Broadway Cable Railroad Company. (Although perhaps the prize for the most interesting institution name would have to go to a building in Vineland, NJ that had a Seth Thomas clock: the Training School for Feeble-Minded Children.)
I suppose when America had that tragic, collective spate of bad taste in the late 60s and early 70s, many of these buildings?with their clocks?were torn down. Luckily, some of these gems are still around for us to enjoy. Hurry up please, it's time.