On 30th Street yesterday I saw, through a ground-floor window of one of the old wholesale clothing shops, a lady vacuuming. It was raining and foggy out, and steamy at the same time, and that stretch of street was almost empty of people. I could see the lady in the shop from the back, stylishly dressed and slim. She looked like photographs of Twiggy in magazines that I remember looking at and wishing I had skinnier legs. Then she turned around and came toward the window with her vacuum, and I saw that from the front she was actually not a young lady, but more likely somewhere in her mid 70s or older, and she looked very good. A man about her age sat at a table with an adding machine, looking over his glasses at his paperwork. Up in the West 30s there are still quite a few old shops with old people who have been running them since Twiggy, and a lot of big old buildings full of little businesses with freight entrances and fancy hand-painted numbers over their doors. In the fog and steam yesterday, some of those blocks looked like watercolor paintings using a lot of browns and shades of gray and white.
I followed a postman pushing his wagon full of mail past some pretty old houses on a stretch of West 30th Street the way postmen have been doing forever, and thought of an article I read a few days ago about Denmark doing away with its national postal service after 400 years, and hearing how our postal service may not be far behind. Ours has been going since 1775 with the first Postmaster General being Benjamin Franklin, whose face I saw yesterday on a big lighted ad on the 8th Avenue side of Penn Station. I thought of the card I got from my friend Agosto Machado a few days ago, his new year card that he makes and sends out every year, and I thought that I should really mail more cards before I can’t anymore, the way they can’t in Denmark, except by paying the equivalent of $9 for the stamp.
It’s been an age since I got or wrote a letter. I remember getting letters from friends who lived in the Village. My friend Liza Stelle would regularly send me letters that she wrote on Leroy Street and mailed to me in Chelsea. I remember her telling me about visiting a research library once to look at some old letters they had in their archives, letters that had been sent to Greta Garbo. She told me how wonderful it was to unfold those old hand-written letters, and how intimate it felt to read them. One of my favorite things is to look at old letters and hand-written music compositions on display in the Morgan Library Museum. They once had on view a little collection of letters from within the family of a Civil War soldier. He wrote to his wife and their children about what he and the other soldiers had to eat every day, and his wife had let their youngest son write a letter to him that was just scribbling, because he hadn’t actually learned to write yet. I also saw at the Morgan a hand-written grocery list made by Voltaire with eggs, butter, and cheese on it.
I thought of this stuff walking on 30th Street, where at the end near the river, perched atop the old railroad highline, stands a giant, very realistic pigeon sculpture made by an artist named Iván Argote, which I’ve gotten very attached to, so I don’t like the idea of his leaving this coming Spring, which is apparently what is planned for him. I thought of all the carrier pigeons of the world and zip tubes and telegrams, and how ingenious those methods of sending notes were. I wondered if there are people younger than I am who have never gotten a letter, who get a text and think: I’ll treasure this text forever, and I thought of my ma, who kept a letter from her grampa, sent to her sometime in the late 1940s, in her safe deposit box.
When I got to the blocks of 30th Street by the pigeon, I turned around and walked back on the other side of the street so as to try and not miss anything. I thought of how many ordinary things have disappeared over the years, slowly enough that one would almost not notice—parking meters, Hebrew National hotdog stands, knish sellers, off-track betting, sidewalk newspaper sellers wearing aprons stamped with The New York Times, phone booths—and I remembered something else I’d not thought of in a long time, which was calling the United States from Japan in the 1970s when I was a schoolgirl there.
You’d check to be sure that the time of day was right, and then dial the international Japanese operator, which was always a woman, and give her the American telephone number. She would repeat it back to me, and then ask that I please wait on the line, and I would hear a vast opening of what sounded like a tunnel through the universe, and the American international operator, also always a woman, would answer in a voice surrounded by wind. The Japanese operator would say: “Good evening United States, this is Japan calling,” and then give the number. Once the call was put through and the person I was calling answered, the two operators would thank each other, I’d be told I could speak now, and the operators would say goodbye. I remember finding that very exciting at the time, though I don’t know if I realized what an elegant exchange that was. But I do now.
I wonder about those operators, those ladies in their respective countries with all their decorum. They’d be old now, probably with some good stories. Those professions must have felt then to be at the pinnacle of modernity.
Copyright 2025 Romy Ashby
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