Letters to Strangers: To the Lower East Side septuagenarian of many stories —
May 24, 2024: New York City
Perched on the plush stools at our local bar, my roommate and I are giving dating tips to the bartender who’s giving us happy hour pricing in exchange. You climb onto the seat next to us, order nothing but a ginger ale, and within the first 5 minutes, hand us each two business cards: the first for your podcast, and the second for your public art installations. I should’ve known then, that you, Gregg with 3 Gs and tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses, have worn so many odd hats in your 70+ years.
You’re native to New York, narrowly escaping the draft as a young teacher in the South Bronx. But your true calling — when not occupied by women — began with bronze art commissions for conference rooms of executives you generally despised, but who gave great “financial advice”. You lowered your voice, then, to tell us about how 20 grand in savings tripled the first week you bet it on IBM’s first computer. Over the decades, your art installations blend multiple mediums — inlaying large photographs of portraits or cast metal with the textures of its urban environment, changing the experience of pedestrian spaces.
The art projects got larger; on East 41st Street in front of the New York Public Library, you sculpted 100 unique plaques displaying famous quotes in literary history. One plaque stands out — “the world is made of stories, not atoms (Muriel Rukeyser)”. I’m not surprised this quote made your selection.
You tell stories to strangers you meet in your neighborhood bar — of nearly getting arrested during your time coaching as a pickup artist, of being catfished on a dating app, of your affair with a married woman. To anyone who will listen, even the simplest question will trigger an eccentric tale, only to follow with a self-aware “ah, I’m rambling again.” You now spend most days in your studio in the LES telling stories, testing one more medium, the podcast. From “Drug Dealing with Dad” to “Me And Kissinger,” snippets of your life and others’ have become immortalized.
25 years after the Library Walk plaques were installed, duller now after bearing the footsteps of millions of New Yorkers, you say in an interview: “Getting someone hurtling along to stop in their tracks is real success.” In a city full of people bustling along like atoms, skeptical of anything that would break their course, you and your stories are a suspension of buzzing curiosity. You’re a fragment of the creative soul pulsing behind decades of artistic outflow in New York, part of the magnetic force that continues to pull stories from pavement.
Stories, that like atoms, are never truly created or destroyed, but rather mesh into every moment, waiting to take form — sometimes in that of tortoise shell glasses, wielding a pocketful of business cards and a glass of ginger ale.
My inspiration for this series, Letters to Strangers, comes from the compilation of the same name by Colleen Kinder. She writes:
“We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again. How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us.
These essays don’t say, I knew you. They say, I never really knew you. They confess their own partial gazes. They open up territories we didn’t know we had inside of us. They offer themselves as vessels for our least official ghosts.”
Memory is imperfect, romantic, and often a reflection of ourselves. Writing letters to strangers allows me to embrace this semi-reality.