The local paper for the Upper East Side THE DUCHESS AND THE CAMERA <P.12
WEEK OF AUGUST-SEPTEMBER
31-6 2017
The city’s statue of Dr. James Marion Sims, on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street along the perimeter of Central Park, has sparked an outcry and calls to take it down because the “father of modern gynecology” was known to have operated on enslaved black women with neither anesthesia nor consent. Photo: Jim Henderson, via Wikimedia Commons
MONUMENTAL BATTLE RAGES OVER MONUMENTS HERITAGE Statues, portraits, plaques — and even a tomb — face possible eviction. Will it leave a hole in our history or right historical wrongs? BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
The city is at a crossroads. The face it presents to the outside world could be transformed. The way it views itself may metamorphose into something else. And the very nature of its past could be rewritten. What’s going on and what is at stake? Mayor Bill de Blasio summed it up when he explained the grand ambitions of City Hall’s latest initiative: “We’re trying to unpack 400 years of American history here,” he said. Exactly. In those 10 pointed words, he synthesized his administration’s con-
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troversial plan to conduct a “90-day review of all symbols of hate on city property.” Supporters were heartened. The backlash was swift. After President Donald Trump’s equivocating response to the neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic and white supremacist violence in Charlottesville — “many sides” were to blame, he said — advocates demanded a purge of tainted historical figures commemorated in city statues and monuments. A tear-them-all-down movement quickly developed. There’s no defense for totems of hatred and flashpoints of intolerance, the argument went. Start by pulling down the statue of Christopher Columbus from its 76-foot-tall perch in Columbus Circle, critics said. Then, rename the circle. “He’s the biggest genocidal murderer the globe has ever seen,” said
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The 75-year-old Zen Buddhist monk Samu Sunim (at center, with red sash over gray robes) surrounded by about 30 members and followers in front of his Zen Buddhist Temple at 206 East 63rd Street. Photo: Zen Buddhist Temple, via flickr
GOOD KARMA ON 63RD STREET RELIGION Or how a Korean monk opened a Zen Buddhist temple in a jinxed East Side townhouse famed for its 12 failed restaurants — and finally ended a curse BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
There were aging beatniks and younger hippies, acid heads and flower children, radicals and revolutionaries, “freaks” and “squares,” cops and, tourists, ex-nuns and slumming socialites, mendicants and missionaries. The place: Washington Square Park. The time: August 1967. The ethos? Psychedelic drugs and sexual abandon. The required reading? A pair of 1950s novels by Jack Kerouac, “The Dharma Bums” and
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“On the Road.” Immortalized as the “Summer of Love,” celebrated for good vibes yet marred by bad trips, here was a countercultural cauldron into which stepped a then-25-year-old Zen Buddhist monk from South Korea who had found his way to Greenwich Village after a sojourn in San Francisco. “Haight-Ashbury was my very first cultural shock,” Samu Sunim recalls. “The Village and the park and the hippies would become my second cultural shock.” Orphaned in Korea, Sunim was a seeker of enlightenment and wisdom, salvation and liberation. But he was also a homeless beggar living on the streets, sleeping on park benches, panhandling from passers-by. A contradiction? Actually, no. In that turn-on-tune-indrop-out era, one hardly ruled out the other.
It wasn’t long before Sunim realized he needed to earn a living. So he took a night-shift job sorting parcels for UPS. Soon, he’d rented an apartment at 454 West 45th Street, founded the Zen Lotus Society in his home and began his first Dharma practice, which in Buddhism refers to the realization of the teachings of the Buddha in one’s daily life. His initial stay in the city lasted all of five months. He had entered the U.S. illegally, he acknowledges,
CONTINUED ON PAGE 6 Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday, September 1 – 7:10 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com.
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