The Free Range Rooster and Hen of Greenwich Village, with Update

Many of the sleepy, late-arising citizens of Greenwich Village awoke this morning to the alarming and seemingly unbelievable sounds of "Cockadoodledoo!" Arising early myself, as is my habit, and strolling the non-farmed streets of Bleecker and LaGuardia with the two hounds, I encountered a disheveled black rooster, cockadoodledoo-ing away, at full register, in the midst of the LaGuardia Community Gardens. Greeting passersby on the way to the Morton Williams Supermarket, the rooster seemed happy struttin' its stuff amidst all the well-tended perennials. I chatted with a man peering through the fence who said he was just awakened by this loud "Cockadoodledoo!," and he said his wife told him he was dreaming.

But, wait, there's more! In another little fenced enclosure, at the very SE corner of Bleecker and LaGuardia Place, roamed a little white hen. So, they're a couple! But how did they get there? Last year, we enjoyed the presence of a wild turkey for a few days, one that is well-known and that flies around Gotham from its usual free-range home in Battery Park. But we have not seen such ordinary fowl in these parts.

I was on the scene late this afternoon, reporter notebook in hand, again with the mutts who find the rooster too loud for their sensitive mutt ears, and inquiring of locals as to the mysterious appearance of said rooster and hen. A guy at the supermarket said he heard that someone dropped them in the gardens in the middle of the night. Sad! Could they not take care of their fowl and wished for a better life for them in the midst of gentrified bohemia? But, couldn't they have found a better place for them than next to a grocery store, one with a decent butcher department?

CHICKEN UPDATE April 16, 2008!!! Ladies and gentlemen, the chickens have left the building. Some buzz on the street as to the mysterious overnight disappearance of the rooster and the hen. NYers, listen for a "Cockadoodledoo!" in your neck of the woods.

Images: LaGuardia Community Gardens. Bleecker Street and LaGuardia Place. The Free Republic of Greenwich Village. Walking Off the Big Apple, April 15, 2008.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Dining New York by Southwest

See the related posts for Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City.

I'm a Fritos-type person, and in my experience it's always the skinny vegetarian person who shows up with the blue corn tortilla chips at a party. Blue corn, however, is the spirit of New Mexican cuisine, in addition to posole, green chili peppers and Chimayo chili powder. While there's no exact match in New York for dining in an adobe courtyard and smelling the piñon wood burning in a horno oven while looking at the stars, the city does have a few good Southwestern restaurants worth visiting.

Mesa Grill
102 5th Ave, New York 10011
Btwn 15th & 16th St
See Frank Bruni's revisit to Bobby Flay's popular restaurant here. This review is fresh, at the time of this posting just a day old.

Agave
140 7th Ave S, New York 10014
Btwn Charles & W 10th St

Los Dos Molinos
119 E 18th St, New York 10003
Btwn Irving Pl & Park Ave

Miracle Bar & Grill
415 Bleecker St, New York 10014
Btwn Bank & W 11th St

Santa Fe Grill
62 7th Ave, Brooklyn 11217
At Lincoln Place

If in Santa Fe and Taos, these are the Classics:
Santa Fe: La Casa Seña, The Pink Adobe, Santacafé, The Shed, Coyote Café.
The Pink Adobe's Steak Dunigan, a New York Strip with sautéed mushrooms and green chili, is cow heaven. Casa Seña features a trout wrapped in banana leaves and baked in adobe, so you have to smash it open at the table. Mark Miller's Coyote Cafe, representing the Santa Fe craze of the 80s, can be a fun, though expensive, theatrical dining event.

Taos: Bent Street Cafe and Deli, Doc Martin's at the Taos Inn, Ogelvie's Bar and Grill.

My favorite southwestern chef is Stephan Pyles, but eating at his restaurant requires a trip to Dallas.

Image: The Pink Adobe, on the Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe, New Mexico, with turquoise bike and dog. Photo by Walking Off the Big Green Chili Pepper.

A Face Like Garbo's

"She is like a lovely wilde-wood animal...or a child." -
Photographer Edward Steichen on Garbo. His 1929 photograph of her for Vanity Fair is widely reproduced.

While I take a break from inputting Garbo data into a new Google map, I want to talk about my dog depicted here. While out walking today, a man came up beside me and started chatting about the beauty of my dog. When he asked about her breed, I told him that she was predominately a mixture of rottweiler and chowchow but with a little shepherd tossed into the mix. He said that he thought her coloring was "rare" in its beauty, but he could also see in her a slight intimidating quality. The phrase "femme fatale" came to me, a description sometimes used in respect to Garbo.

This conversation about my dog is repeated each and every day. The toughest dudes in the park will look up and comment, "That's a beautiful dog!" I've seen young women put their hands over their gaping mouths when they spot my dog, like they just saw Johnny Depp. A woman tending to flowers in a nearby community garden went into raptures when she saw my big pretty dog. In a refined English accent, she commented, and with great effect, drawing out and enunciating each word, "Nature...shall...never...copy...that...face...again."
Dinnertime conversation at our house often includes stories about what people said that day about the dog.

Beyond the perfect symmetry and color of her features, the dog exudes a slight air of weariness and caution. If a stranger approaches too close, she's more than happy to act like a trained killer. I love this quality about her. Garbo had it, too.

The dog that I left in the elevator is a fox terrier. He's cute, but he's forever upstaged by the beautiful dog of diverse heritage who spent her formative months in the pound.

See complete Garbo Walks.

Image: BearBear, pastel drawing by WOTBA

I Left My Dog on the Elevator This Morning

Early this morning I walked our two dogs around the neighborhood as usual and then returned home to the apartment building. Both my dogs, a big one of diverse heritage and a little one of terrier lineage, seem to have no problem understanding the elevator system in the building. So this morning, we get back home from the walk, step into the elevator, and I punched the button for the floor. I dropped their leashes for the brief ride up. Usually, when the elevator door opens on our floor they like to dash out and race one another to the apartment door.

This morning, everything seemed fine until I reached our apartment. Maybe I was a little sleepy. Here's the big dog with me, I thought, as I unlocked the door. But where's the little one?

Maybe he already rushed into the apartment, and I just didn't...uh...notice...No, doesn't appear to be here...Or...maybe he's still in the hallway.
Uh...oh...

Over 350 people live in our building, and there are three elevators for service to seventeen floors. All I could think to do in my panic was to take the first elevator that arrived, ride down to the lobby and alert the doorman.
When the door opened, there was my little dog in the lobby, waiting at the elevator, wagging its little tale.

Crisis over.

I talked to the doorman later. "The dog was really cute," he said. "He seemed to ask, 'Where is she?'"

The Cloisters Up Close: Ermengol X

Ermengol X (1254-1314), Count of Urgel, wore pointy shoes, organized a lovely tomb chapel for family members, and he died without heirs. I know this because I researched his life. I spent part of Sunday in the Gothic Chapel at The Cloisters drawing his shoes, and it seemed kind of rude not to know more about him. I don't know how to pronounce his name.

I wasn't at all familiar with the territory of Urgel, Ermengol's home base, but I have since learned that the area belongs to Catalonia, Spain, and it's near the Pyrenees. The area also benefits from historical ties to Andorra.

The Ermengol family looked comfortable enough in their tomb effigies (other members are in the same chapel at The Cloisters), despite the fact that Ermengol X intended everyone to stay together at the Church at Las Avellanas back in Spain and not at the Cloisters at Las Henry Hudson Parkway in Nueva York. I doubt he expected to have his feet sketched and blogged 700 years later by a Texan.

In tomb effigies it is common to see the individual resting his or her feet upon a lion, a religious symbol of virtue. For example, we see this in the effigy of Jean d'Alluye, the handsome knight in the center of the Gothic Chapel. See him on The Cloisters site here.
However, in Ermengol X's case, I think the animal is not a lion but a favorite dog. It looks more like a dog than a lion, because it has floppy ears. Funerary imagery often included dogs, a symbol of loyalty.

I wondered if E. was comfortable in his pointy shoes. Fortuitously, I found a website that's the final word on this type of footwear - poulaines, complete with instructions on how to make them and a scratchy picture of Ermengol X's shoes.*

* A friend from rural Texas told me that she had an ignorant history teacher in high school who referred to the important American Black Muslim leader as "Malcolm the Tenth."

NY Puppy Sticker Shock: How much is that doggie in the window? ARF! ARF!

"Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of the income of the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is also more imperative." - Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

While strolling through the West Village today I came across cute puppies for sale in a window. I don't need any more dogs, but I went into the store anyway. The sign in the window read "Uptown dogs. Downtown prices." Oh so adorable, these little ones! Some puppies slept on top of one another, and others licked their bellies. I loved the puppy that pressed its nose on the glass cage and wanted to lick my face. "How much for the rat terrier?" I asked. Pulling out a chart, the clerk located the rat terrier on the list and said that with today's very special discount of $100 the terrier would cost $995.

Jaw dropping. Obviously, New Yorkers of means will want to spend as much as possible for their puppies. You've probably heard that the Queen of Mean, the late Leona Helmsley, left $12 million in her will for the care of her Maltese.

I, too, spend some money on the proper care of my dogs, including an annual summer haircut of $150 for the big dog. That's $25 more than my own cut at a fashionable Soho salon. I have also bought into the whole dog wellness food industry, purchasing cans with labels such as "Thanksgiving Dinner," "Senior Medley" or "Cowboy Stew." I also buy them sweet potato glucosamine snacks for their aging dog hips. But Walking Off the Big Apple's beloved pets came to her free, as they needed a loving home. If someone bought a puppy for $1095, I worry they might be disappointed if it didn't work and want to take it back.

Walking Off New York with Other Species

I see lots of dogs when I am walking around New York, and frequently I bring along a couple of handsome hounds myself. But after seeing the movie Village Sunday, the one I presented to you in a previous post, I got to thinking about the cute pet primate in that film and how that wasn't unusual around here.

Lately I have seen a woman that takes her cat out for a walk. I was in Duane Reade the other day when I found myself behind a woman who sported a live cat on her shoulder. The cat was on a leash, it was well-behaved and seemed to take interest in the transaction at the counter. The clerks engaged the woman in some chit-chat about her cat, and the woman said that, yes, her cat loved this sort of excursion. When she left I have to admit that there was much eye-rolling and knee-slapping, that sort of thing.

My favorite, however, is a woman who takes her pet turtle out for a walk. I saw them in the courtyard of an apartment building, and I was startled to see a turtle in the first place, much less one that walked faster than me. I went over to talk to the turtle's mom to inquire about the situation, and I was delighted to find out that the name of the shelled one is Good Luck. The turtle mom, a human being, said she likes to take out Good Luck once a week.
Other species need to stretch their legs, I concluded, but I think the cat basically got a free ride.

Image: L'Orso Bruno di San Marco, 2006-2007.