By Diana Hottell
Nibbling at Life
“We keep prying apart the folds of this place. Let’s see, in the past week we’ve been splattered with holy water at a Ukrainian church, eaten lunch at the exclusive Yale club, sat by the welcome coal stove at McSorley’s, had a hot dog in the basement of Our Lady of Pompeii with Brazilians, took the L train to Canarsie, heard Tom Miller talk about the hidden history of various houses in the Village, and had the stomach flu.”
As I sat down to write an introduction of Bill and Diana Hottell to the West Village, the inexorable hand of fate once more intervened—Diana sent me the above message.
A question about the October issue of WestView first brought Bill to 69 Charles.
Diana just turned 70 and Bill is a little older—but with no children and some money these gray haired innocents nibble deftly and quickly at the smorgasbord of life.
“Let’s learn French”—they fly and live in Paris till they do.
“Let’s see this part of the world”—they drove from Alaska to the tip of South America.
Below Diana tells some of their story.
–George Capsis
Twisp and the Village
The very first night we arrived in the Village I learned a lesson: we were odd.
It happened when Jimmy snatched the mic from the band and announced to the throngs in Arturo’s that the couple over there in the window booth had been married for 50 years.
As one, everyone dropped their forks and wheeled around to stare.
“And not only that,” he went on. “They come from a small town in the mountains of Washington State—only 900 people live there—and, get this, they chose to spend three months celebrating right here in Greenwich Village.”
The loud applause and cheers, plus the pointed looks we got (“hell, my two marriages didn’t even add up to that”) told me 1) we were indeed strange, and 2) we’d made the right decision to come here.
Back in Twisp, Washington, we’ve watched cougars amble by our living room window. For over 40 years we’ve lived at the edge of the wilderness, an 8,000 foot peak in the North Cascade Mountains our view from 80 acres along the Twisp River.
To shake ourselves out of our comfortable routine we chose to rent an apartment in the Village.
It’s not like home. To put it mildly. But that was the point.
So many things surprise us.
Like I’m beginning to think New York is really just made up of a slew of villages. People we’ve talked to seem to be very devoted to their neighborhood and don’t even go wandering away to other neighborhoods.
Back to that first night. I asked door host Laura if she was from here. “No,” she said. “Oh,” I said, “so where are you from?” “Queens,” she said.
My husband and I did not come here to go to Broadway shows. But we are daily and vastly entertained by living here. The theater is on the street, on the subway, in farflung neighborhoods, in nearby parks.
Your dog runs have high entertainment value for me. New York dogs, I’m concluding, can be quite out-of-control in tiny leashless spaces. The Washington Square dog run is playground and peep-show rolled into one. It’s boisterous, director-free mayhem.
William Helmreich, in his comprehensive book, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City, makes the case that no one ever need to leave the city to experience the world.
As a lover of languages, I’m in polyglot paradise.
When I do the laundry across the street from our apartment I speak Spanish, then go around the corner to a French bakery while the drying cycle finishes. The different overheard languages on streets and buses and subways are constant and wonderful.
Being culturally Catholic we’ve poked into several nearby churches. Our favorite is Our Lady of Pompeii where we’ve gone to Mass in Italian and Tagalog and will go to a Brazilian one before long.
Down in the basement of that church we went to a community dinner and had wonderful conversations with our tablemates, an Italian older man who’d been born in the neighborhood and never left, a lovely Brazilian woman who’d moved here in the ‘60s to work for the Brazilian consulate, and a Philippina.
In Twisp eating tacos is about as exotic as it gets.
So far, I’ve only missed one thing: the stars. In Twisp, the night skies are so dark you can easily see the Milky Way. For 60 nights running one dry summer, we slept outside under the shifting constellations.
However, for these three months in the Village, I’ve happily traded the stars for this crush of humanity in all its staggering manifestations.
