For thirteen years, I have been taking taxis up First Avenue from the Lower East Side — Planet Megan. Imagine my surprise when, on a recent uptown lurch, the cab driver chose not to scoot through the stoplight-free tunnels in front of the United Nations complex. For the first time ever. I can’t say that the surface route was any slower, really, but the idea that we might be stopped made me fret. Not so much, though, that I didn’t catch a glimpse of the modernist monument that the United Nations has occupied for just about as long as I’ve been alive. Until now, that is; the organization has decamped so that the sixty year-old forum of international harmony can be given a new lease.

Driving by, instead of below, the front of the United Nations was this taxi ride’s second novelty. The first was a trip down East Fifth Street, which, west of Loisaida Avenue, is a cul de sac. A rather Jacobean-looking public school on Avenue B appears to have been  blocking Fifth Street since long before the United Nations was even dreamed of. Dead ends, common as dirt elsewhere in the United States, are quite unusual in Manhattan. Indeed, unless stopped, I am going to seek fame and fortune by researching a coffee-table book on the subject (lavishly illustrated). I’m going to call it Culs de Cons. I have never been able to fix the meaning of those two rather nasty French word in my mind, so it seems only sanitaire to repe them into the same title, where I can keep them out of trouble. 

Update: To the contrary notwithstanding, I heretofore nominate this entry as Most Desperate of 2010. It’s only May, I know, but, sometimes, you can just tell from the smell. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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