A 'Still Spot' In A Bustling Borough

Guggenheim Museum Sets Up Shop In Jackson Heights
story and photos by Sam Goldman

Finding an oasis of quiet in what is perhaps the nation’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood was the focus of “stillspotting: Queens,” a combination oral history exhibit and walking tour that debuted on Saturday, Apr. 14 in Jackson Heights and will run on weekends through May 6.

The program features storytellers reading works specially written by people with connections to the neighborhood.

According to David van der Leer, the curator of “stillspotting,” the exhibit took over half a year to prepare.

The exhibit’s goal, he told the Times Newsweekly, was to examine “what does it mean to be at home.”

For instance, professional voice reader Jere Gage read a story penned by Fr. William Briceland, the chaplain of Elmhurst Hospital Center, in the hospital’s Serenity Room, a quiet room for the facility’s employees.

Briceland’s story centered on Augustine Martinez, an illegal immigrant who was seriously injured in a car accident in 2007, his road to recovery (which included eight surgeries), his struggles with his faith, and his relationship with his family, especially his brothers.

In Briceland, “he saw someone who can help with his psychic or spiritual wounds,” the story said.

The chaplain would see Augustine several times after the accident, and find that while his wounds have healed and his life was being rebuilt, he struggled with post-traumatic stress syndrome. He would eventually move in with his brotherAlberto, with his other brother Jesus a frequent visitor, and his room became “the still spot in his life,” where he would watch movies and work to “make himself whole again.”

Afew blocks away, at Terraza 7, a Spanish bar at 40-19 Gleane St., Devang Shah, a student at Parsons School of Design, read a story from Himanshu Suri, a member of the avant-garde rap group Das Racist (pronounced “that’s racist”).

Suri’s story was that of “Suresh,” a man who grew up in Queens and struggled with depression stemming from a divorce (including three suicide attempts) to carve out a quiet, lonely middle-class life.

Home for him was not confusing. Home for him was work and sleep,” Suri wrote of Suresh before the divorce. “He didn’t have friends. His family was his company, though he didn’t seem to care for them much.”

After the divorce, he found “stillness and quiet” in routine, which eventually included a regular seat at a local eatery named Kebab King, where he and fellow patrons came to escape from family life and feel at home.

“There is stillness wherever you want in New York,” Suri’s story explained. “Routine is how you escape the insanity of this town.”

The project, the third such project in the city, was created by the architectural firm Solid Objectives–Idenburg Liu (SO–IL). After the story, Shah explained that a large part of architecture centered on finding something that fits in with its surroundings rather than the merely functional aspects of construction.

“For architecture, so much of it is about culture. Anyone can make a building that can stand up,” he explained. “If I read this in an apartment, how different would it be?”

“The aim,” he would later add, “is to get at something larger.”

The third story, from author René Georg Vasicek, was read by local resident Tom Pettersen in a small walkup apartment (not his) in the Jackson Heights Historic District, and spoke of a man from a tiny Czechoslovakian town who escaped socialism and moved with his wife to a neighborhood they felt was “felt far more human than Manhattan.”

At first they lived in a home they shared with others of Czech descent, singing songs from the homeland and drinking Canadian beers. Eventually the husband got a job in a Flushing plant as a steelworker, then started his own business making bagel-making equipment. In the process, he assimilated into a culture than was unlike the American dream they were expecting, and created their own path.

“People still ask us, ‘so what are you?’ What do you mean, ‘what am I?’ I am precisely what I am,”” he explains. “Here in Jackson Heights, the question makes no sense.”

New immigrants “grasp at an America that is no longer there,” he continued.

Also contributing pieces to the story are writers Nicole Steinberg, Queens historian and activist Erik Baard and Ashok Kondabolu of Das Racist.

Tickets are $10 and will grant you entry to four of the six spots open at one time.

For more information, visit http://stillspotting.guggenheim.org/vi sit/queens/.