Greenwich Park Quotes

The privileged backgrounds of the accused. The vulnerability of the victim. The beauty of the backdrop. The ugliness of the detail.

Long ago, when New York City was affordable, people who felt they didn’t fit into the mainstream could take a chance and head there from wherever they were. Bob Dylan came east from Minnesota in the winter of 1961 and made his way downtown to Greenwich Village. Like countless others before him, he came to shed the constricted definition of his birthplace and the confinement of his past. I first saw Bob at Gerde’s Folk City, the Italian bar and restaurant cum music venue on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Streets, one block west of Broadway and a few blocks east of Washington Square Park. Bob was playing back-up harmonica for various musicians and as a duo with another folksinger, Mark Spoelstra, before he played sets by himself. Mark played the twelve string guitar and had a melodious singing voice. Bob’s raspy voice and harmonica added a little dimension to the act. Their repertoire consisted of traditional folk songs and the songs of Woody Guthrie. They weren’t half bad. Bob was developing his image into his own version of a rambling troubadour, in the Guthrie mode.

Captain Joseph Frye One of the nicest parks in present day downtown Tampa, Florida, is the Cotanchobee Fort Brooke Park. The 5-acre park, which lies between the Tampa Bay Times Forum (Amalie Arena) and the mouth of the Hillsborough River at the Garrison Channel, is used for many weddings and special events such as the dragon boat races and the duck race. Few people give thought to the historic significance of the location, or to Captain Joseph Frye, considered Tampa’s first native son, who was born there on June 14, 1826. Going to sea was a tradition in the Frye family, starting with his paternal great-grandfather Samuel Frye from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, who was the master of the sloop Humbird. As a young man, Joseph attended the United States Naval Academy and graduated with the second class in 1847. Starting as an Ensign, he served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy until the Civil War, at which time he resigned and took a commission as a Lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. The Ten Years’ War, also known as “the Great War,” which started in 1868 became the first of three wars of Cuban Independence. In October 1873, following the defeat of the Confederacy and five years into the Cuban revolution, Frye became Captain of a side-wheeler, the S/S Virginius. His mission was to take guns and ammunition, as well as approximately 300 Cuban rebels to Cuba, with the intent of fighting the Spanish army for Cuban Independence. Unfortunately, the mission failed when the ship was intercepted by the Spanish warship Tornado. Captain Frye and his crew were taken to Santiago de Cuba and given a hasty trial and before a British warship Commander, hearing of the incident, could intervene, they were sentenced to death. After thanking the members of his crew for their service, Captain Frye and fifty-three members of his crew were put to death by firing squad, and were then decapitated and trampled upon by the Spanish soldiers. However, the British Commander Sir Lambton Lorraine of HMS Niobe did manage to save the lives of a few of the remaining crewmembers and rebels.

At the top of the Palisades in Weehawken, New Jersey is a small park known as the Dueling Grounds. This Revolutionary War site, overlooking New York City to the east, and what had been Half Moon Bay to the north is where Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, was mortally wounded by a single shot from Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol on the morning of July 11, 1804. He died the following day in Greenwich Village, across the river in New York City. The duel was because Hamilton, the former secretary of the treasury, interfered with Aaron Burr’s bid for the presidency of the United States and again, by successfully opposing his candidacy for governor of New York. Burr’s vindictive retaliation cost Hamilton his life.

Trying to work out where it all began, where it all started going wrong. And I suppose the real answer is it started years before you could have ever imagined it did.

But sometimes when I see his face when he walks in, I’m worried to ask how his day was.

Would I be so cheerful, in her situation? Although she hasn’t said so explicitly, it’s clear there is no father in the picture. And she is so young. I wouldn’t have the strength to do all this on my own. I mean, he might have been a bit useless lately, but I don’t know what I’d

Meanwhile, the girl has already had to have two new identities as a result of being named on the internet. She has been moved away, for her own protection, to an area where she has no family support. Something he says makes me wonder if she has made an attempt on her own life.

left Cambridge ten years ago. Yet Helen seems to lean on the memory of those summer days like a crutch. I don’t know why she must talk about it so endlessly, why it seems to matter so much more to her than it does to us.

feels like a dead time to me. A time defined by absence, by waiting.

In the end, I stop trying to arrange to meet my work friends. After one lunch is cancelled at the last minute, then another, I get the message. People are busy, too busy for me, anyway. I’ve already been forgotten.

would never occur to me to ask people to pay all that money to celebrate my life, my marriage. I remember I’d been pleased to have been invited, even if the emails about it had been rather bossy. I hadn’t really known what to expect. Perhaps there would be five or six of us, I had thought – just her very closest friends, a private chef, perhaps a few after-dinner games?

She knows my parents are dead. She knows my work friends don’t want to meet up with me. She knows all these secrets now – I have revealed them to her, one by one. She knows I’ve got no excuse.

He’d stormed upstairs. I knew he was going to have a cigarette on our balcony. He likes to think I don’t know about the cigarettes. Or the coke. He likes to think I don’t know a lot of things. I’d picked up the magazine, thrown it in the recycling. On the cover, his face looked like somebody I didn’t recognise.

Eighteen thousand people,’ Rachel announces triumphantly. ‘And you’re knocking down a load of council houses for a few fancy apartments with a gym.’ She rolls her eyes, grinning, as if this is all hilariously funny, instead of hideously uncomfortable. ‘I bet most of it is foreigners, isn’t it? Buying from abroad? I bet half of them won’t even live there.’ Lisa’s expression hardens from lukewarm to glacial.

think he just didn’t know what to make of it, of their exuberance, the decadence of it all, the platter of riches he was being offered. A few times, I noticed him glancing over, as if pleading for help.

They did their best, of course. But it is, in the end, not an easy thing to hide. The unmistakable stench of desperation. The cringing eagerness of the salesmen of damaged goods, for whom they’d finally found an interested buyer.

When I traced it back, I couldn’t quite work out how I’d even got to this point. Had I ever even liked this girl, really? Had I encouraged her friendship? I didn’t think I had. Yet somehow, she had become my problem. A problem I wasn’t sure how I was going to solve.

I look at the discarded cans and cigarette butts that litter the beautiful garden, the rotting fruit from Anna’s beloved pear tree. I wonder what Helen’s parents would think of their children now.

him was this? Hospitals, nightmares, bleeding, misery, dead babies. He was chained to it, to my useless body: bloated, bleeding, bearing the ugly scars of pregnancy and birth, but with no life, no child to show for it. I started to feel I was dead already.

Oh, come on. You were together, by the bookcase. Just the two of you, for ages. You were standing really close to her. Why did you have so much to talk about when you’d only just met her?

don’t get it, Katie,’ he says. ‘You met this girl what – once, twice? Why are you interrogating me about it?’ He leans closer. ‘What are you asking? Are you saying you think I’ve got something to do with her going missing?’ ‘Of course not. Don’t be stupid!

Sometimes, for a few hours, he convinces me. I allow myself to decide it’s not my fault, not my problem. I mean, we’re not responsible for her, are we? We were just gullible enough to take her in for a couple of weeks.

After Grenfell we’d done a big investigation into these blocks, tried to find out how many more were death traps, coated in dangerous cladding, at risk of infernos. I’d been haunted by thoughts of fire for a long time after covering Grenfell. I couldn’t stop thinking about all those people, trapped like animals on the upper floors.

think how lucky I am to own my tiny one-bed in Dartmouth Park, to have dodged the rental trap so many graduates like me have fallen into. Paying hundreds of pounds a month just to live somewhere like this. Somewhere where the windows only open up an inch.

sit on the ball again and rock back and forth, trying to massage the pain out of my hips. I feel like screaming. None of what he is saying makes sense. Why didn’t she tell her dad she was pregnant? Why was she always here if she lived miles away? What was she doing in Greenwich all those times? And if she lied about that – what else had she lied about?

The thing about Serena is that she somehow seems to collect female friendships, effortlessly, like the bangles she wears on both wrists. I think of that awful hen weekend in Cornwall again. There were friends from Serena’s primary school, secondary school, university, work, ‘hockey’ – I had lost count. How is it that some women amass such huge collections of people who love them, yet I can’t even go to an antenatal class and make one nice, normal friend?

Don’t patronise me, Charlie. Don’t you fucking dare. And anyway, I obviously did have to. I obviously can’t rely on you to tell me the truth.

Not you. But them. Them and my fucking brother. You know after everything, he still expects me to bring him stuff, to his parties. It’s the only reason the two of them want me around. Fucking hypocrites.

anyone would be. You were not crazy.’ This is her latest theme – that I’m a victim, just like Rachel. Except Rachel is the one who was raped, robbed of justice, and who ended up dead. Not me. ‘I’m just saying. If you saw those things, you saw them.

Things just went from bad to worse that night in the club, when Rachel came on the scene. We didn’t know her name, then. We just knew it was the girl from the boathouse floor. Daniel and I were only there because Rory had dragged us there to charm some sleazy client. It was the worst luck in the world.

Contrary to the impression left by toga party costumes, the toga was closer to the size of a bedroom than a bedsheet, about 20 square meters (24 square yards). Assuming 20 threads to the centimeter (about 130 to the inch), historian Mary Harlow calculates that a toga required about 40 kilometers (25 miles) of wool yarn—enough to reach from Central Park to Greenwich, Connecticut. Spinning that much yarn would take some nine hundred hours, or more than four months of labor, working eight hours a day, six days a week. Ignoring textiles, Harlow cautions, blinds classical scholars to some of the most important economic, political, and organizational challenges that ancient societies faced. Cloth isn’t just for clothes, after all. “Increasingly complex societies required more and more textiles,” she writes. The Roman army, for instance, was a mass consumer of textiles.… Building a fleet required long term planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce. The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested, and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.

It wasn’t until she arrived in New York that she experienced the sense of homecoming she hadn’t known she was missing. The first time she saw the city, it was as if something exploded in her chest—it was that visceral, that immediate a falling in love. New York didn’t feel like a city to her; it felt like a country. The nation-state of New York, where the world’s restless and ambitious gathered, where the misfits and the misunderstood arrived—and the city didn’t so much welcome them as shift just a tiny bit to accommodate them, to test them, to see if they had the right stuff. And if you passed the test, then all of it was there for the taking—the joyful riot of color and smells of Jackson Heights, the eclectic streets of Greenwich Village, the elusive tranquility of Prospect Park, the benches at the Battery, where one could sit undisturbed and stare at the “lady of the harbor.” Smita remembered what Shannon had once said: “This city is like some giant social experiment conducted every single day. This place should be a fucking powder keg—but somehow, it’s not.

loudly

And I learn, for the first time, what power there is in justice, in being believed.

But then, no one really thinks they are bad, do they? Whoever we are, whatever we've done. We all have our reasons, if anyone can be bothered to listen.

Whoever we are, whatever we’ve done. We all have our reasons, if anyone can be bothered to listen.

With every new misery, another thread comes loose.

It can be hard not to stare at happy people. They are mesmerizing somehow.

but he always looked at them with the same reverence, mingled with a vague wonder as to what it was that people admired in ruins, seeing that they generally made such short work of inspecting them, and seemed so pleased to get away and take refreshment. Ruins and copious refreshment ware associated in Mr. Gilbert’s mind; and, indeed, there does seem to be a natural union between ivied walls and lobster-salad, crumbling turrets and cold chicken; just as the domes of Greenwich Hospital, the hilly park beyond, and the rippling water in the foreground, must be for ever and ever associated with floundered souchy and devilled whitebait.

I had to remember not to stare. It can be hard not to stare at happy people. They are mesmerizing somehow.

Iniziai a camminare pensieroso per le strade di Londra, sperando forse di poterla rivedere almeno un’ultima volta ancora. Camden Town, King’s Cross St Pancras, Green Park e così Embankment e St Jame’s Park; lungo il Thames nel parco del Greenwich observatory e poi ancora a Bank: Londra sembrava diventare triste e vuota. Anche London Bridge, Knights Bridge o Millennium Bridge, sembravano essersi spogliati del loro fascino, come accadde per Backingham Palace e Westminster Palace. Era davvero giunta l’ora di lasciare l’Inghilterra.

A city is different things to us at different times - of the day, of the year, of our life. Many years have passed since I was in the backseat of the car, taken with the razzle-dazzle. Today, I'm more drawn to the neighborhood coffee shops, or modest old parks like Abingdon Square in Greenwich Village, where farmers come to sell cheese and eggs under the London Plane trees. I have a soft spot for the little urban island like McCarthy Square, with its birdhouses - some with simple peak roofs; others with multiple stories and decks, made of miniature wood logs, like ski chalets - that poke out from shrubs and evergreens. I like the quiet of the West Village in the morning, where sidewalk chalkboards outside restaurants and coffee shops promise caffeine and better days, and streets paved with setts - Jane, West 12th, Bethune, Bank - feed into Washington Street like streams emptying into a river.

History abounds in and around New York City, however much of it is buried in the concrete of newer construction. The downtown financial district from Battery Park to Wall Street is such a historical district. Trinity Church at Wall Street and Broadway and the Churchyard surrounding it is where Alexander Hamilton and his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton along with other notables are buried. The story of Alexander Hamilton is an important part of New York City’s history and has become a Broadway musical. At the top of the Palisades in Weehawken is a small park known as the Dueling Grounds. This Revolutionary War site, overlooking New York City to the east, and what had been Half Moon Bay to the north and directly beneath it, is where Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, was mortally wounded by a single shot from Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol. He died the following day in Greenwich Village at the home of his friend William Bayard Jr.