Somehow I’ve been so busy that I haven’t posted to my blog for over a month.

That seems hard to believe, but during the next couple of weeks I hope to catch up with all my myriad projects and post them online. After the dust settles we’ll see everything that I’ve been up to.

For starters, here is one project that I have been involved in: helping to lay the foundation for an arts and culture center at the United Palace Theatre on Broadway at W. 175^th Street.

Have you been inside? It’s breathtaking. Built in 1930 as one of the last great vaudeville houses, in a style that is described as Moorish/Rococo, the Palace was quickly turned into a movie house. Then in 1969 Reverend Ike purchased it for his church and painstakingly preserved it, at the same time many of the other great movie houses were being carved up into soulless multiplexes.

It seats around 3,200 people, considered the third largest venue in Manhattan. At the height of Rev. Ike’s popularity he would attract 5,000 people over several services on a single Sunday afternoon. The theatre also hosts concerts: I’ve seen Iggy Pop and Bob Dylan there.

Since Rev. Ike passed away a few years ago, the church – and the building – have passed on to his son, Bishop Xavier. It is his vision to build an arts center that is driving what we are calling the “next chapter” at the Palace.

(The above photo shows workers taking down the fence that has long surrounded the building, a moment of deep symbolism for the neighborhood.)

I got involved in January when Michael Diaz, AKA Juan Bago, introduced me to Marianna Houston at one of his networking breakfasts. Xavier hired her to lay the groundwork for the arts center. Since she lacked neighborhood contacts, I got involved to help pique interest with the local folks.

Consider interest piqued.

There will be a mini open house at the United Palace on May 31 when the 10^th annual Uptown Arts Stroll stages its kickoff reception there. The following week on Fri., June 8 there will be a screening of the award-winning documentary “To Be Heard” that follows three South Bronx teens as their lives are transformed by spoken word through the Power Writers program. All this activity attracted the attention of Bruce Diamond, a reporter at the Daily News. He wrote a great piece on Fri., May 11 that sums up where everything is at.

We hope this is the tip of the iceberg. After beginning to welcome the artistic community inside, we hope sparks will fly and new programs will take root there.

We have all been dreaming about a dedicated arts space in Washington Heights – it would be amazing if our dreams were answered by Rev. Ike’s legacy. It was his vision to preserve the building that is allowing us to have these opportunities today. Our local artists and community certainly deserve a Palace to showcase their work in.

For the last several months I have been trying to figure out how the influences in my life intersect:

• Photography
• Anthropology
• Journalism
• Northern Manhattan
• Community

Rather than just idly meditating, I actually had to make sense of these jumbled thoughts because I was scheduled to deliver a talk titled “The Art of Community” at the Morris-Jumel Mansion on Saturday, March 24.

Nothing like working toward a deadline to motivate a lucid thought process.

On one hand, just preparing for the talk made this a useful exercise, forcing me to spend several days last week methodically figuring it all out, finding the commonalities in my work. Even if I never spoke it was a worthwhile endeavor.

On the other hand, conducting the talk in person allowed me to hear what these ideas sound like in the real world so I could ferret out the more ridiculous ones. Nothing like standing up in front of an audience to fully vet an idea.

The photography project I am working on mirrors my efforts to figure it all out. It combines several different projects that I have started over the years uptown – “Setting,” “Character,” “Theme” – that each explore a different branch of photography: landscape, portraiture, abstract fine art. A few weeks ago I came up with a working title that seems to sum up this project: “A Story About Washington Heights (and Inwood, and New York City, and America, and Me and You, and Us.)”

The talk put all of this in context and began to set the stage for the next part of the project: “Plot.”

Lots of great folks showed up Saturday, around 35 people total. About half were strangers and half were family members or friends.

It was very cool to have so much support and interest from the start.

We all crammed into the Mansion’s Octagonal Drawing Room. I took the above photo (via remote trigger) just before beginning the talk – which is a good thing because I completely forgot to take more photos after I started.

Early on it was clear that I had attained one of my goals: by a show of hands, over half of the audience said it was the first time they had ever visited the Mansion.

Speaking in front of a group for an hour largely about myself felt incredibly self-indulgent, but based on feedback from the audience – both people I knew and strangers – the talk was well received. Everyone stayed for the entire hour and most (if not all) of the audience members joined us downstairs for the “weird” part of the day: the hands-on project.

When I graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in anthropology, my thesis on Highway One included a unique way of recording the subjects’ voices in the ethnography by having them write their thoughts on photographs of themselves and the landscape. It was based on a book called “Rich and Poor” by photographer Jim Goldberg.

In the basement of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, 20 photographs I had printed of the Mansion and its grounds were spread out on work tables. As I read a list of facts about the history of the Mansion, audience members sifted through the images and wrote what they thought on them. I encouraged audience members to treat the experience like commenting on Facebook or a blog, responding to each other and scribbling down whatever struck their fancy.

Looking over these comments this morning I’m pleased to see that I have a rich collection of words – data – to work with. From the poetic, to the wistful, to the factual, to the absurd. The sentence that has stuck with me for its beautiful profundity: “Going to New Jersey wasn’t a good idea!” In the context of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, from which General George Washington retreated across the Hudson River in the face of British and Hessian troops, it’s an immensely ironic statement.

The next step is figuring out what form these final pieces, “Plot,” are going to take. I suspect that, much like the talk itself, I’m going to try to mash up everything together in a series of collages, creating something utterly new in the process.

And if I like the results, I’ll replicate the talk and audience writing activity in different locations throughout Northern Manhattan.

At least that’s the plan for now.

I’ve got a couple of photography projects at the Morris-Jumel Mansion that begin this Saturday, March 24 from 2-4pm.

I will give a talk called “The Art of Community” from 2-4pm that is my first attempt to try to weave together my interests in photography, anthropology, Northern Manhattan, and the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the oldest house in Manhattan.

It will include the initial photographs from a four-part series I have been working on about Northern Manhattan, including the first public showing of the portraits from the “Message Delayed” project.

The Mansion is also hosting a stripped-down version of “Northern Manhattan as Muse,” my portraits of local artists who use Washington Heights and Inwood for inspiration. The exhibit will be up for a couple of months.

My talk on “The Art of Community” is Saturday, March 24 from 2-4pm at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, 65 Jumel Terrace. Please call for reservations: 212-923-8008. Cost is $5, free for members of the Mansion.

The closest train is the C at 163^rd Street.

Google Map.

A Cubist montage of the Morris-Jumel Mansion

The arts continue to become more intrinsically threaded into the fabric of Northern Manhattan. Multiple groups have held arts-related fundraisers for the businesses that were burned out in Inwood earlier this year. People’s Theatre Project and Word Up Bookstore continue to astonish in the ways they use the spoken and written word to draw people closer together by drawing out their individual stories. Businesses like Le Chéile and Apt 78 host regular arts events to attract customers. Don’t even get me started on all that NoMAA does.

In the last year or so it’s dawned on me that this is the thing that fascinates me the most: how art – or anything where people find commonality – can become a beacon that people rally around to form community, no matter how fleeting.

It’s what drove me at the Manhattan Times, what motivated me to co-found the Uptown Arts Stroll, and why I graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in cultural anthropology.

At the same time, I’ve always been very keenly aware of my personal tug-of-war between being an individual and a member of a community. My natural state is to be a loner.

I’ve been trying to resolve all of this with a unifying theory about the overlapping roles art, photography, writing, community, and individuality play in my life.

In two weeks I’m going to start publically exploring where this line of thinking is taking me (and us).

On Saturday, March 24 from 2-4pm at the Morris-Jumel Mansion I’ll make a presentation called the “Art of Community.” (Details below.)

It will include the initial photographs from a four-part series I have been working on about Northern Manhattan.

The first part is “Setting,” the photographs I have been taking at sunrise and sunset from the highest rooftops in the area.

The second part is “Character,” portraits made at local street festivals last year that are part of the project “Message Delayed.” (Incidentally, this will be the first time these photographs are publically shown.)

The third part is “Theme,” collecting the abstract photographs of street ephemera I’ve taken since 2006.

The talk will end with a hands-on project with the audience that will help direct the fourth part of the series: “Plot.”

While each aspect of this series has pushed my photography in a different direction and addresses some of the inspirations in my work – from artistic to subjective – it’s “Plot” that will really push me in new directions. To prepare for it I’m taking a class called “Experimenting with Collage” at the Museum of Modern Art. The photograph accompanying this blog post, a Cubist montage of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, is one example of the new artistic terrain I’m exploring.

(A stripped down exhibit of my “Northern Manhattan as Muse” project will also be on display at the Mansion and on view for several weeks after the talk.)

The four-part project is tentatively called: “A Story of Washington Heights (and Inwood, and New York City, and America, and Mike Fitelson, and you, and us).”

Why the Morris-Jumel Mansion? Serendipity. I happened to exhibit at an arts festival there last year and was asked to give a talk, which gave me the opportunity to start unloading all the stuff rumbling in my mind over the years.

But the Mansion has also become a symbol in this series. I’m regularly amazed by the number of people who grew up in the neighborhood who have never been to the Mansion and don’t know anything about it. It was built in 1765. Temporarily served as General George Washington’s headquarters during the beginning of the American Revolution. Was the home of Aaron Burr. Became a national historic landmark. Is the oldest house in Manhattan.

In the transient neighborhoods of Northern Manhattan, where for a century each new immigrant group has largely erased the one before it, our bedrock institutions – both physical and cultural – should be used to help anchor the vast melting pot that comprises the local population.

If art is to serve as a common language uptown that helps bridge our cultural differences, places and things like the Morris-Jumel Mansion should be among the first words we exchange with each other.

At least that is one of the ideas this series explores.

I’ve never done anything like this talk or this photography project before; I don’t exactly know how it is going to turn out.

So if you are just as fascinated as I am about where all this is going, or if you have something to contribute about Washington Heights, photography, or the Morris-Jumel Mansion, join us for the conversation/photography project on March 25.

And if you can’t wait that long to hear what I have to say about the projects I’m working on or the background on “Northern Manhattan as Muse” check out the February 12 episode of the Internet-based Washington Heights and Inwood Radio Show. Hosts Claudio Cabrera and Carolina Pichardo were kind enough to feature me on their initial broadcast of the year. You can hear it here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/heightsinwoodradioshow/2012/02/12/wash-heights-inwood-radio-show-ep-22.

My talk on “The Art of Community” is Saturday, March 24 from 2-4pm at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, 65 Jumel Terrace. Please call for reservations: 212-923-8008. Cost is $5, free for members of the Mansion.

The closest train is the C at 163^rd Street.

Google Map.

Out of nowhere, the arts started booming in Washington Heights and Inwood. Now, as an artistic community it feels like we are on the verge of great things.

At least that’s the narrative that I’ve repeated to myself as momentum has built year-by-year.

I found out last Friday, February 10, that’s only half the story.

It was a funny day. A meeting that morning seemed to confirm all the work that the arts community has expended over the years to, for lack of a better term, put ourselves on the city’s cultural map. That was followed a couple of hours later by a second meeting that put everything into a new perspective and reminded me of the fragile connections that any community endeavor is built upon.

The first meeting was billed as “Café with the Artists” and hosted by NoMAA. The idea was to meet with local elected officials and Kate Levin, the city’s commissioner of Cultural Affairs, to talk about how to better advocate for Northern Manhattan’s artists and continue to stoke economic development uptown.

There was a good turn out on both sides of the microphone. State Senator Adriano Espaillat, Assembly Member Guillermo Linares, and City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez were the electeds. About 50 artists and arts organizations of all stripes were the audience.

Rodriguez movingly described how we need to educate our young people about arts and cultural, using as an example how his five-year-old daughter has now been to more museums than he ever visited before adulthood.

Espaillat spoke forcefully about the need to brand this neighborhood, with its existing and growing population of artists, as an arts destination, and the need for the city to help spread the word about what’s happening up here. For too long, he said, downtowners have mistaken large sections of Northern Manhattan for the Bronx.

Paramount, he said, was creating a central location – a hub, he called it – that visitors would gravitate to and then learn about other area points of interest. (For years he advocated for just such a performing arts center, called Casa Duarte, that was to be located on the far west end of Dyckman Street.)

This piqued the interest of many in the crowd who dream of converting the historic Coliseum theater at the corner of W. 181^st Street and Broadway – closed since October – into a film/performing arts center. Espaillat said he remembered watching James Bond films at the Coliseum when it was still a single screen theater.

This philosophy – build an arts center and they will come – has passed for conventional wisdom in the arts community for years. During Q&A the audience echoed these ideas back. Affordable arts spaces, several speakers said, are Northern Manhattan’s number one need. Veronica Liu, who co-founded Word Up community bookstore, put it in perspective. Since opening the doors in June, the store has hosted over 500 performers on its humble stage. That’s a whopping number. And it doesn’t even count the legions of open mic performers. Clearly there is a demand for an arts space.

Commissioner Levin, however, reframed the issue of space. Reminding the audience how “fierce” the real estate market is in Manhattan, she said that instead of expending tremendous amounts of energy on creating that one magnetic destination it was more valuable to develop as many great activities as possible. The quality of the art, she said, is more important draw than the real estate.

Levin also countered the prevailing argument that in order for the arts community to flourish we need a central destination. SoHo, she reminded us, didn’t develop a central hub but rather numerous “spokes” that each attracted a different audience.

Levin’s point was very good. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t continue to work for an arts center, we are and we will. But in the meantime we need to continue to produce great artwork, continue to provide audiences with many reasons to visit Northern Manhattan, whether those visitors come from out-of-town or just down the block.

Essentially this was the thinking behind the creation of the Uptown Arts Stroll, which NoMAA took over when it was founded five years ago. Since we have no single destination to showcase all of our artists, we promote dozens of locations where art can be found during June and encourage cultural consumers to visit a bunch of them.

And NoMAA is on the cusp of being able to do even more. It was selected as one of over 120 finalists out of 2,000 applicants for ArtPlace, a private-public collaboration of nine of the nation’s top foundations; eight federal agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts; and six of the nation’s largest banks. Using the arts to foster economic development has always been part of NoMAA’s mission. NoMAA just completed the application and will find out in May if it is picked. That would come with a nice chunk of change for programming and marketing as well as recognition: ArtPlace wants its grantees to be models that other communities around the country can follow.

Clearly there is a lot going on. Like I said, it feels like we are on the verge of something big uptown.

All of this was going through my mind, served as the backdrop, for my meeting on Friday afternoon.

Over the years I had heard about a group called Arts Interaction that was active uptown in the 1980s. It was defunct by the time I came onto the scene in 2002 but its presence could still be detected, particularly on the outside of Community Board 12’s offices on Haven Avenue at W. 168^th Street where the word “gallery” was still stenciled on the window. I had heard great things about its leader, the indefatigable Joseph Hintersteiner, but he passed away in 1995.

In all my adventures in Northern Manhattan I had never met an artist who had been part of the group.

During a casual conversation with Steve Simon (even if I were to list all the affiliations he’s had in relation to Northern Manhattan it would not add up to a full accounting of the impact his work has had uptown so let’s just label him “Community Board 12 member” and leave it at that) a couple of weeks ago he said that he could get me in touch with one of the founders of Arts Interaction, which, oh by the way, used to have an office in the same space that NoMAA currently occupies.

I was excited to finally have a connection to the past. Hearing that the group had also been headquartered at the Cornerstone Center on Bennett Avenue was downright spooky.

That was only the first of what would be a series of parallels between Arts Interaction and NoMAA.

Steve helped me get in touch with Heather Schweder, who graciously took my call early in the week and agreed to meet me at NoMAA on Friday.

Between my work at the Manhattan Times and all the arts stuff I’ve done uptown I’ve met hundreds, if not thousands, of local residents. But somehow I had never crossed paths with Heather.

After speaking with her for only a few minutes about events that were over 30 years old, it was obvious that Heather’s passion for arts building hadn’t diminished. Her memories were fresh, detailed, confident.

Arts Interaction was created in 1978 from a City Spirit Grant from the NEA to help foster the local arts community and drive economic development in Washington Heights and Inwood. She was one of two people hired to run the program for the two years before the grant ended.

The group’s first order of business was to create a public awareness campaign to promote Northern Manhattan and its cultural resources. They had to overcome the belief that Inwood was part of the Bronx.

One of the campaign tools was signage on area buses that highlighted uptown treasures like the Cloisters, the Dyckman House, and the incomparable array of ethnic food that can be found here.

They also took reporters on tours to introduce them to the neighborhood, which resulted in stories in the New York Times, New Yorker, and Daily News.

Another initiative was to get the arts into local classrooms, particularly though a collaboration with the Cloisters.

To find out what local artists and audiences wanted, Arts Interaction held an arts congress, which resulted in programming for the next two years. Economic development was one of the goals, and it helped spark the creation of the Washington Heights Inwood Development Corporation, which still runs the Medieval Festival every October.

When the future of the Coliseum theater was threatened, Arts Interaction held a fundraiser on the stage, a vaudeville show, that attracted the likes of Cab Calloway, who performed. Arts Interaction advocated that the Coliseum be turned into an arts space. Other community members wanted it to be a parking garage. Eventually the Coliseum’s single magnificent screen was subdivided into several smaller theaters, now shuttered and facing an uncertain fate.

When the grant ran out Arts Interaction became a completely volunteer driven organization. It established a desk at the office of Community Board 12 where it also had a gallery, active for over 10 years. Hintersteiner was elected president and was the driving force behind it for many years. But Arts Interaction faded away after he died.

Heather, who has had a long career as a writer and researcher, said that she remained active in Arts Interaction for a few years as a volunteer but parenting and professional obligations continually pulled her further away from its activities. Heather has continued to live in Washington Heights. While she did attend an open studios day during the Stroll a year or two ago she has not been aware of NoMAA’s activities, or the uptown arts scene in general.

The story of Arts Interaction is a story of a community pulling together, bootstraps and all, to create a better place to live. It has strong echoes to how the last 8 years have unfolded for the contemporary arts community.

Let’s inventory the parallels:

• NEA grant
• Public awareness campaign to establish the fact that there are cultural treasures to behold in Northern Manhattan
• Office space at Cornerstone Center
• A popular movement to save the Coliseum theater and possibly use it to house much needed arts space
• The strong support of Community Board 12, which was instrumental in producing the first few Uptown Arts Strolls
• The goal of channeling the arts for economic development

What do you make of this?

Part of me feels like it is evidence that we are on the right track, confronting headlong the issues that Arts Interaction identified 30 years ago.

But part of me can’t stop feeling like this is somehow a cautionary tale. There were only a handful of years – 8 at the most – between the end of Arts Interaction and the first Uptown Arts Stroll in 2003. How could Arts Interaction have just disappeared so quickly? How did it leave no footprint? Would our contemporary arts community be further along had we been about to build upon the foundation of Arts Interaction?

It reminds me of how fleeting community can be, the traditionally transient nature of Northern Manhattan’s population.

History is important to a community’s understanding of itself. In the last few weeks three different Northern Manhattan natives, all of whom I deeply respect, each surprised me because they did not know some vital element about their neighborhood.

The first had never been to the Hispanic Society of America, where many masterpieces of Spanish painting reside, until NoMAA staged the opening reception of the Uptown Arts Stroll there a few years ago.

The second had never heard of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, where General George Washington planned the early battles of the Revolutionary War, until I mentioned I’ll be doing a photo exhibit there in March.

The third didn’t know that John James Audubon, the naturalist and painter, had an estate in lower Washington Heights and is the reason so much of the neighborhood is named Audubon this or Audubon that.

This is one of the reasons that I’ve worked so hard on the arts uptown. It can highlight things that we didn’t know we have in common, serving as a language that pulls us together rather than being another obstacle that pushes us apart.

Knowing that 30 years ago another group of Northern Manhattanites had the same vision that we do now makes me feel like we are on the right path, that perhaps this community has art in its DNA. Yet we need to be mindful of how easily the present slips away into the past, leaving you with names on street signs and landmarks but no understanding of why these people were significant, no way to grasp their contribution to the community.

I feel like we are doing it right this time, that we are creating a narrative that is remembered and the institutional connections to carry it forward.

I can’t stomach the idea of having to educate another generation of New Yorkers that Inwood is not the Bronx.

Read Luis Miranda, Jr.’s column in the Manhattan Times on the meeting with Kate Levin and the history of NoMAA here.

Strangely enough, I had never photographed a track event there.

On Saturday, February 11 I shot the beginning of the 105^th Millrose Games. It was the first time the event had been held at the Armory after 86 years at Madison Square Garden. Judging from the reaction of the crowd – and how close you are to the thundering action – this will be a good fit for some time.

One of the things I love about event photography is that no matter how many weddings or celebrations you cover, each one is a unique experience with the opportunity to make singular images.

Take the bat mitzvah party I photographed for the Cohler-Esses family a few weeks ago. It had some of the same ritualized elements from every other bat mitzvah I’ve ever been to. It was even held at Congregation Ansche Chesed on W. 100th Street, where I have photographed numerous times over the years.

But the photographs from the Cohler-Esses party still look distinct from all the others I’ve done over the years. I think it is because each event gathers a different group of people, each attendee contributing a slightly different personality to the overall experience. Expressive faces always stand out in a crowd.

The Cohler-Esses party was characterized by exuberant dancing – everyone got into the act, young and old alike. The customary hora dance and chair raising gave me no indication that there would be hours of dancing to follow. It’s like all the attendees were practicing to be contestants on “Dancing with the Stars.”

At the center of it was the girl of honor, Ayelet who kept on rocking, popping, and heel-kicking, all the time smiling from ear to ear.

Last March I was out in Vegas with some friends I hadn’t seen in many years. Being one of the two East Coasters on the trip, I was awake every morning around 5 a.m. And bored. On Saturday I decided to check out the sunrise on the strip.

We were staying at the Wynn, which is right on the edge of the modernized section of town. Outside the hotel I found the sun gloriously reflecting off the tower of the Trump casino, bouncing around creating some crazy shadows. I held the camera to my eye for a couple of minutes waiting for something to happen. That’s when this dude entered the frame. I couldn’t tell if his night was ending or his day was beginning. He was heading toward the older section of the strip, adding another layer to his story.

Not sure what got me thinking about this photo. It might be because I’m close to finalizing plans to meet up with the gang this summer in Denver, or that I just watched the movie “Swingers” for the thousandth time. Or maybe it’s that line from “Ocean’s 11″: “Ted Nugent called: he wants his shirt back.”

With apologies to Christopher Auger-Dominguez, DJ Boy, and Paul Lomax, I believe the best photograph taken of me in recent months is this one, snapped by none other than Helen, my three-and-a-half old daughter.  I had just started playing with a new D700 with a 50mm and she demanded to get to play with it also. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked that relaxed and, yes, happy in a photo. I wonder what she’d charge to assist me on my next shoot.

The Washington Heights Business Improvement District is publishing another in a series of special sections in the Manhattan Times that is focused on the “I ♥ 181 St” campaign that we cooked up a year ago. With Valentine’s Day just around the corner we had the perfect tie-in for me to ask people what they love about the commercial strip. (Pick up the Manhattan Times on Wed., Feb. 8 to read all the responses.)

I probably did my first man in the street interview 18 years ago for The Montclarion in Oakland, CA. Couldn’t tell you how many I’ve done since then – 200? 300? – although only a handful of them have been for the Manhattan Times.

I’ve always enjoyed doing the interviews, the opportunity to interact one-on-one with the public. Being in the trenches.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one, but it was easy to fall back into the routine. You have to hook a passerby’s attention with as few words as possible, get them to pause long enough for a quote and photo. It’s important to not sound like you’re selling something. And you can’t get angry when they ignore you. I long ago learned to always say something nice to the people who just walk by. That way I don’t end up saying something nasty.

The thing that’s changed over the years is that so many more people are plugged in to their music players and cell phones in public. That actually makes the job easier since those are the people who are generally less likely to stop to have a conversation with a stranger. Headphones are like a sign that says “don’t bother me.” They weed themselves out, saving the interviewer time.

Today was easy. The spring-like weather didn’t hurt. I had 10 good conversations (including one person who declined to be photographed) in about an hour.

I love the fact that you never know who you’ll meet. I could have spent hours talking to the last person I interviewed, Julia Martinez (who is pictured above). After she told me what she loves about W. 181^st Street I asked what her job was. I wasn’t sure what kind of answer I’d get because she had told me her English wasn’t very good and I wasn’t sure if she was retired.

Taxi driver, she said, adding that she prefers to drive at night since that’s when there is less traffic so you can pick up more fares.

“I make more money at night,” she said.

I would have never guessed that in a million years. Another reason to love W. 181^st Street.