{"id":522,"date":"2019-02-24T20:10:26","date_gmt":"2019-02-24T20:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/?page_id=522"},"modified":"2020-11-21T22:19:24","modified_gmt":"2020-11-21T22:19:24","slug":"the-good-fortune-of-hurricane-katrina-by-helen-rubinstein","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/the-good-fortune-of-hurricane-katrina-by-helen-rubinstein\/","title":{"rendered":"The Good Fortune of Hurricane Katrina by Helen Rubinstein"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Good Fortune of Hurricane Katrina<\/em>
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s a simple coincidence, thousands of miles away from New Orleans, that forces Helen Rubinstein to understand the gravity of Hurricane Katrina.
\n<\/strong>09.05.11 published in The Bygone Bureau<\/p>\n

I moved from New Orleans to New York in August of 2005, three weeks before Hurricane Katrina. \u201cMoved\u201d is maybe an unfair word \u2014 I had been away at college for most of the previous four years. But I\u2019d spent that summer with my family in the house where I\u2019d grown up, getting ready for the first big step of my adulthood: a one-way ticket to New York City, where I hoped to find a job and a life. I brought with me one suitcase of warm-weather clothes \u2014 enough to last a two-month sublet of a friend\u2019s furnished room \u2014 and told myself that October was when I\u2019d make my real decision about which city I wanted to call home. The winter clothes, the books and lamps and coats \u2014 these two months were preliminary, I told myself, a test; those heavier things could come later.<\/p>\n

Part of New York\u2019s allure was the personal history I had there: my mother grew up in Queens, her parents immigrants from Europe after the war. So when I woke up from a dream about my grandfather on one of those first Saturday mornings \u2014 August 20, to be exact \u2014 I decided I\u2019d walk to see the building in Brooklyn where he\u2019d once owned a general store.<\/p>\n

My path from Park Slope to Red Hook that Saturday was as tentative as my relationship to the city, so it seems particularly miraculous that I arrived at 353 Van Brunt Street at the exact moment I did. I was scared by a boy bicycling past with a giant goiter on his neck, scared by a chorus of barking dogs that turned out to come from a doggie daycare, and disappointed enough to almost turn around when I saw that the building, now a gallery, was closed, its metal grate pulled down. But instead I called my mother to confirm the address, and lingered inside the caf\u00e9 next door. And then I passed number 353 again. In front of the building where my grandfather\u2019s store had been, a couple stood talking to a woman who was gardening behind a fence in the adjacent lot.<\/p>\n

\u201cCome in,\u201d I heard her say. \u201cI\u2019ll show you around.\u201d The couple on the sidewalk thanked her as she disappeared inside to open the front door.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s going on?\u201d I had to ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, my grandfather used to own this building,\u201d said the woman on the sidewalk. \u201cShe\u2019s going to give us a tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYour<\/em> grandfather used to own this building?\u201d I said. \u201cMy<\/em> grandfather used to own this building.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a moment, we were confused. She asked me my last name and I hers; we double-checked the building number and street. Marjie\u2019s grandfather, Charles Kentler, was the gallery\u2019s namesake, she told me; she pointed to the cornice where his name was still inscribed. My grandfather\u2019s name had once been on the building too, I told her; I\u2019d seen it there \u2014 MAGIER\u2019S, for Mendel Magier \u2014 in scores of old photos.<\/p>\n

And then we realized that both of our grandfathers had owned the building \u2014 hers at the turn of the twentieth century, mine in the fifties and sixties. She and her husband had decided to stop by after driving into the city from Fairfield, Connecticut, for brunch that morning.<\/p>\n

When Florence Neal, the building\u2019s current owner, opened the front door, Marjie introduced me.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is Helen,\u201d she said. \u201cHer grandfather used to own the building, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the kind of moment people like to call a New York moment \u2014 the kind of encounter that can happen only in a city as crowded with potential for coincidence as this one. Florence, who carefully restored the building after receiving it through the city\u2019s artist housing program in 1987, also curates a collection of neighborhood photos and documents called the Red Hook History Files. She was the perfect person to have opened the door onto two granddaughters of two of the building\u2019s unrelated past owners, and for the next few days, she and Marjie and I would email each other, partly to share stories and pictures, but also just to reassure ourselves that our meeting had really happened.<\/p>\n

After I left the gallery that day, I wandered up the street and got lost in a labyrinth of art and wine at the waterfront artists\u2019 summer show; later, when I went looking for the bus, the organizers of a block party begged me to accept a plate of fried fish and chocolate cake. It was a strange and magical day. Perhaps equally as memorable as my encounter with Florence and Marjie was when, after floating up Van Brunt Street in hazy disbelief, I found myself standing abruptly before the Statue of Liberty. It was my first glimpse of her since getting to New York, and I felt then that I\u2019d truly arrived.<\/p>\n

I was standing in the same spot the following Saturday, August 27, writing a postcard to my family, when my mother called and told me about the storm that was set to hit New Orleans around Monday. She was waiting in a miles-long line for gas; my sister, who\u2019d just started her freshman year of high school, was home and worried that the math test she had scheduled for Tuesday would still take place even though school was projected to be closed on Monday. I mumbled something reassuring into the phone, then finished writing the postcard and put it in the mail.<\/p>\n

That postcard did make it to my parents\u2019 house, but not until late December. I was home then, helping with repairs, showering at a gym and eating from the mini-fridge my dad had hooked up in the least-damaged room upstairs. When I pulled the postcard from the mailbox it took me a minute to realize what it was, where and when and even from whom it had come.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook what finally arrived,\u201d I said, carrying it into the house. To me, it was a relic of an enchanted time: enchanted because it was on the other side of Katrina, but also because it was so close to that first afternoon in Red Hook, when my presence at that exact place and time in New York City had seemed so auspiciously fated.<\/p>\n

My mother read it over quickly, then put it in the trash. \u201cIt\u2019s old,\u201d she said when I asked her why \u2014 I\u2019d never seen her throw away anything I\u2019d mailed her before \u2014 but I think the date on that postcard offended her with its ignorance of all that was to come, its childish certainty that a hurricane scare would never be more than just that. When she saw that I was upset, she said, \u201cIt was automatic. I guess I\u2019m just in the habit of throwing things away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it was from Red Hook.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew how stupid it sounded. Not only was I fetishizing my associations with a neighborhood, like too many an overeager New Yorker, but I was whining about a postcard<\/em> while standing in the dusty, gutted entrance to my family\u2019s house, where there was no longer furniture, flooring, or walls \u2014 in the middle of a city where a fate like ours was a lucky one. Still: \u201cI wanted it,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

That the card had made it to New Orleans after all those months \u2014 that flimsy square of paperboard: where had it been? where had it gone? \u2014 seemed to corroborate my faith in the coincidence that had inspired it. Sure, logic told me it was foolish not to accept that a chance meeting could be purely chance. But I couldn\u2019t help feeling a persistent awe at the encounter on Van Brunt. The likelihood of Florence being outside and Marjie and I both poised on the sidewalk in front of her building in the very same instant seemed impossibly small.<\/p>\n

Our coincidence had convinced me that I was in the right place, there in New York City, and the corresponding sense of good fortune had carried me through the difficult weeks and months that followed. When my mother texted me, on the September morning when she and my father were first allowed to go home, to say Standing in your bedroom Can see the sky<\/em>, my distress (the ceiling had collapsed under a hole in the roof) was matched by relief that the room was there at all. I was even aware of how Katrina itself brought a kind of luck: it nullified my post-college existentialism, reminding me of what was so much more important than launching a personal or professional trajectory \u2014 friends and family, shelter and food.<\/p>\n

So, though I still didn\u2019t have full-time work come October, the decision to stay in New York was an easy, unthinking one. The city had given me something to believe in \u2014 luck \u2014 at a time when I needed to believe in it. That fall, events that might have seemed ominous to someone unsure of their relationship with the city \u2014 or unaffected by Hurricane Katrina \u2014 felt oddly incidental to me: one evening, I left a bag of my favorite clothes and journals in a taxi and never got it back; another time, a teenage girl deliberately kicked me down in a Queens subway station, causing me to knock my head on the platform.<\/p>\n

That day, two strangers from the R train insisted on taking me to a caf\u00e9 nearby to get ice. They told me about the man who\u2019d run after the girl, shouting at her \u2014 they\u2019d thought he was my boyfriend \u2014 and then called an ambulance to check if I\u2019d had a concussion. Afterward (I was fine), one of the EMTs began copying the address from my Louisiana driver\u2019s license onto an insurance form.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t send mail there,\u201d I informed her, repeating what I\u2019d read and heard in the news. \u201cThey won\u2019t deliver it.\u201d<\/p>\n

She asked me for another address, but I didn\u2019t have one: I was about to move out of my sublet, but wasn\u2019t yet sure where to. \u201cForget it,\u201d she said, ripping the paper. \u201cIt\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d the second paramedic asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s from Louisiana<\/em>,\u201d the first replied, and I don\u2019t know why, but it was then, hearing a stranger pronounce \u201cLouisiana<\/em>\u201d with such emphatic gravity, that I felt the dizzying sense of loss I\u2019d not yet allowed myself to feel. The episode in the ambulance had seemed to be another link in the chain of my good fortune, but her tone briefly laid it bare: the New Orleans I\u2019d known was gone; I\u2019d never again be able to claim the place where I\u2019d grown up in a way that was easy or uncomplicated.<\/p>\n

For an instant, I felt sure I\u2019d never see the postcard from Red Hook again, either. But the kind of faith that had persuaded me, until then, that there was still a chance of its turning up \u2014 the same stupid faith that had led me to mail it in the first place; the same childish belief in magic that had inspired me to write it and, later, to perceive the fallout of Katrina as a form of good luck \u2014 that kind of faith is not easily lost. Like the postcard, it can disappear for a few months, or even a few years, and you can try to throw it away, but it\u2019s there in the way we return and rebuild, and even in the way we forget. It\u2019s a form of denial, yes \u2014 denial of danger, of gravity, of grief \u2014 but it\u2019s a denial as natural as the refusal to believe that a chance meeting can be only chance. It\u2019s called hope.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Helen Rubinstein<\/p>\n

Helen Rubinstein’s essays and fiction have appeared in Ninth Letter<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em>, Electric Literature’s Outlet<\/em>, and elsewhere. She teaches writing in Brooklyn and is working on a book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Helen’s grandmother, Helen Sterdiniak Magier in front of Magier\u2019s Department Store, 353 Van Brunt Street, circa late 1950\u2019s or 1960<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Good Fortune of Hurricane Katrina It\u2019s a simple coincidence, thousands of miles away from New Orleans, that forces Helen Rubinstein to understand the gravity of Hurricane Katrina. 09.05.11 published in The Bygone Bureau I moved from New Orleans to New York in August of 2005, three weeks before Hurricane Katrina. \u201cMoved\u201d is maybe an … Continue reading The Good Fortune of Hurricane Katrina by Helen Rubinstein<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-522","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5644,"href":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/522\/revisions\/5644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kentlergallery.org\/news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}