Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photo: Francisco Collazo
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We never leave home without the camera.

It’s heavy, with its extra battery pack and additional lenses, but Francisco always says, “I know I’ll miss the million dollar picture the day I leave the camera at home.”

We are going out to do errands: buy shampoo and conditioner, mail letters and check our box at the post office on 34th Street and 8th Avenue, stop by the library to pick up some books for research, drop off some donations at Goodwill. It’s a day that has the first hint of spring in the air… one of those days when New Yorkers aren’t exactly sure what to wear– some have on shorts, some still sport winter coats.

It’s lovely, but I don’t expect anything out of the ordinary.

34th and 8th isn’t off the beaten path. Macy’s– “The World’s Largest Store”–is a block away on Herald Square, which is only slightly less crowded than Times Square. It’s at least as commercial: all the chain stores are here– H&M, JC Penney, K-Mart, Borders, Old Navy. With the exception of the one block stretch of Korean restaurants on 31st off 7th, the food in this neighborhood is unremarkable, one indistinguishable pizzeria after another, tucked alongside souvenir shops selling tacky Statues of Liberty, plastic snow globes, and New York themed t-shirts that no New Yorker would ever wear.

After you live anywhere for a while, your eyes adjust and start to glaze. It doesn’t matter how extraordinary, how vibrant, how vital your hometown is, it eventually takes on the sheen of the familiar. You start to believe in its static predictability, to feel certain that you’re tough to surprise and delight. After 10 years, you think you’ve seen everything, and so that’s one of the reasons why you travel.

And then you turn a corner, look up, and realize that even the Empire State Building can look new again.

There’s a lot on 32nd and 7th that’s been razed. Right now it’s a raw hole, littered with the detritus of demolition, exposing the backsides of two adjacent buildings that have been abandoned. It’s protected from the curious and the devious by a chain link fence and a wooden barrier pasted with advertisements about Absolut’s new acai berry vodka and television shows I’ve never heard of.

A year from now, maybe less, the hole will be filled and crowned with a skyscraper, new “luxury condominiums,” probably, the latest in a series. Its windows will glimmer and throw off sunlight in great, gleaming arcs.

You won’t be able to see the Empire State Building. Or maybe you will, but just its tip. You defnitely won’t be able to see it from this angle, seemingly dissolving into a far more modest building to the south.

“Hey, stop for a minute,” I tell Francisco, who’s pressing through the crowd of workers hurrying for the train at the start of rush hour. “Have you ever seen the Empire State Building from this angle?”

Click. A change of lens. More clicks.

We turn the corner and look up. “Have you ever seen that?” I ask Francisco, pointing to the second floor of a building where an old sign advertises hand-rolled cigars made with Cuban seed. It seems like Havana, not New York.

Click.

We’re satisfied, snapped out of our usual way of seeing Manhattan, our vision reframed.
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How do you see your hometown with fresh eyes? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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To see more perspectives of overlooked New York, visit our NYC Scenes set on Flickr.

This post has been entered into the Grantourismo-HomeAway Travel Writing Competition.

Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photos: Julie Schwietert Collazo & Francisco Collazo
**

Yesterday was International Women’s Day and March is Women’s History Month, so we wanted to honor women we’ve met in our travels by sharing photos and a bit of their stories here.

Aura Trespalacios, the matriarch of the Trespalacios family, helps maintain the tradition of making filigree gold jewelry, a craft they’ve nurtured over generations. Mompox, Colombia

We spent hours talking with this woman in San Sebastian, Puerto Rico, but I realize only now that we never asked her name. She roasts coffee and gives demonstrations at the Hacienda El Jibarito, Puerto Rico’s first agritourism inn.

This woman waits on the Mexican side of the border in Tijuana. Her husband will meet her… on the American side. They’ll talk and touch through the small holes in the fence.

As I looked through our photos from Brazil, I realized that none of the formal meetings we were scheduled to have were with women. Women were a “backdrop” to the agenda.

Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photos: Francisco Collazo
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“they were digging a new foundation in manhattan
and they discovered a slave cemetery there
may their souls rest easy now that lynching is frowned upon
and we’ve moved on to the electric chair
is there anything i can do
about anything at all

except go back to that corner in manhattan
and dig deeper
dig deeper this time
down beneath the impossible pain of our history
beneath unknown bones
beneath the bedrock of the mystery
beneath the sewage system and the path train
beneath the cobblestones and the water main
beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals
beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels
beneath everything i can think of to think about
beneath it all”
-From the song “Fuel,” by Ani Difranco

**
It was when I first listened to this song on Ani Difranco’s album “Little Plastic Castle” that I heard about what would become the African Burial Ground, but it would be years later before the resting place of Africans brought to New York during the slave trade would be preserved and opened to the public.

The African Burial Ground National Monument was established in 2006, but it wasn’t until February 27 of this year that a visitor center staffed with National Parks Service rangers and designed with informative, interactive exhibits was open, providing visitors with the opportunity to learn more about this important and almost overlooked part of American history.

On Thursday, we visited, surprised to see so many other visitors on a weekday afternoon. Moms with their kids, older couples, a man in a wheelchair, and school children accompanied by their teachers were all exploring the visitors’ center, which manages to perform a teaching function for all ages.

It seems ridiculous to think this might have been otherwise, but in 1991, when the remains were discovered, it wasn’t at all inevitable that the African Burial Ground would be preserved.

Occupying a choice parcel of real estate in lower Manhattan, the lot on which the remains were found was slated to become a federal building and the purchase of the land had already been transacted. In fact, the remains were uncovered by construction workers as building was underway.

Though the remains were excavated, critics wondered whether this was being done respectfully and they were deeply divided over whether the rest of the remains should be excavated or allowed to be preserved as they were. After protests, petitions, a 24 hour vigil, and all sorts of research and feasibility plans, it was decided that part of the burial ground would be preserved and a commemorative structure would be built. A park would be built, it would be designated a national monument, and the public would be able to learn about the history of slavery in New York at an accompanying visitor center.

The remains that were reinterred are in these mounds, visible in the foreground of this photo.

The monument consists of two parts. The pyramidal shaped part is the “Ancestral Libation Chamber,” described by the NPS as a “24 foot chamber that represents the soaring African spirit….” Below the chamber is where the remains were discovered. The exterior is “reminiscent of a ship’s hold,” and “the Sankofa symbol is engraved on the exterior.” The second part of the memorial is called the Circle of the Disapora, and depicts the “complexity and diversity of African cultures” through symbols engraved on stone quarried in Africa.

Entry to the visitor center is free, and it is open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays from 9 AM to 5 PM. The monument and burial ground itself are behind the visitor center. You’re welcome to bring your camera, but be aware that security at the visitor center is stringent, due to the fact that the center is located inside a federal building.

More photos can be viewed here.

Photos & Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
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We spent last week in New England, visiting properties in New Hampshire and Vermont while working on a story about what makes hotels “green,” or environmentally friendly.

It was Francisco’s and Mariel’s first trip to these two states, and my first return years after a childhood family trip.

These states have always struck me as a bit different from the rest of the US. Hugging each other, one is notoriously conservative, the other notoriously liberal. Yet both, in their own ways, seem deeply private, interested in preserving what they view as their own (whether land or ways of living), and marked by a certain nativism.

“It looks like the kind of place where people buy deer burger,” Francisco said as we entered the Franconia Pass in New Hampshire right at dusk. When I wrote that on Twitter, locals replied, “They don’t BUY deer burger; they shoot it.”

*
We forget how diverse our own countries are. Not 300 miles from where we live in New York City, there’s this whole other world, a world where “Moose Crossing” signs replace “Pedestrian Xing,” where people shoot and skin the meat they eat, where people still make their own syrup.

It’s important to step into that world once in a while, to get away from billboards and buzz and the comfort of relatively anonymous urban living and to sit with people who talk about what it’s like to farm land, or make handcrafts out of timber leavings, or who are opposed to windmill farms because they’ll blight the landscape.

It’s important to remember to contest this popular yet fallacious idea that somehow we’ve all become homogenized.

Chew on that when you eat your next hamburger.

Text & Photos: Julie Schwietert Collazo
*

“When will we start learning and caring about places before disasters?” someone wrote on Twitter this weekend in response to the news about the earthquake in Chile.

I understand the impetus of the question, but there’s something naive about it as well.

There are so many places to learn and care about, so many people to know.

That’s one of the reasons why I travel. Though I know plenty about lots of places, I find that I only really begin to understand them when I’m there. And once I’ve visited, I become invested in these places in a way that doesn’t happen to me with those places I still don’t know with my feet or my eyes or my ears or nose… yet.
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That’s what I thought about after news of the quake.

I visited Chile in late 2008, and was moved by this sliver of a country. For one thing, it’s beauty exemplified: flawless blue sky stretching out over glacier-fed water in Torres del Paine, the view around each switchback of trail more beautiful than the one before it.

It’s a true beauty, but not an easy one. Standing here, almost as far south as one can be, the wind blows straight through you with an impersonal, punishing persistence. You learn to accept that what is beautiful must often be appreciated not unadulterated, but in its natural, wild, often messy state.

There were other reasons I was moved by Chile. Its recent history was palpable without being oppressive, its past real and present without having a stranglehold on its sense of now or possibilities for the future. The people I met were ambitious and creative; they were also honest about themselves and their country. “We don’t know how to market ourselves,” one tourism industry professional told me. “We have everything, but you can’t say that in an advertisement.”

Indeed.

*
For more on Chile:

*My article about Google’s Person Finder app and its use in the Chile quake on MatadorChange.

*Matt Scott, one of Matador’s extraordinary and efficient interns, put together our Chile Focus Page today, which is an archive of all the articles we’ve published about Chile since we launched in 2006.

*For more Chile before the quake photos, check out my Chile set on Flickr.