Nathan Schiller

My favorite places in New York City are places that don’t look or feel like New York City. They could be adjacent to the icons, a specific bench in Battery Park or Midtown, a vantage point in Brooklyn Bridge Park or Astoria, Queens, just as much as they could be literally on the city’s outermost edge, a spot that may go days without a visitor.

If you live here, it is nice to discover such places for yourself. 8.5 million people live in New York City (officially), another ten-plus in the metro area. New York County, better known as Manhattan, is by far the densest in the United States.

I will occasionally be somewhere on this island that, compared to, say, the Upper East and West Sides, with their endless high rises, feels like a quaint little hamlet. Then I realize that I’m looking at the residences of fifty thousand people.

I usually experience such places as a runner or cyclist, so they pass me by. But in quarantine my morning and evening commutes have been replaced with walks in Fort Tryon Park and Inwood Hill Park, at the northern tip of Manhattan.

The parks could not be more different. Inwood is raw earth. Rocks and dirt and grass and enormously tall trees. There are some picnic areas, some playgrounds and courts, some fields, but I stay mostly on the trails, in the woods. On early summer mornings there are spots where you hear nothing but birds singing. If you see anyone, it’s probably a birder.

Fort Tryon is much smaller, much more manicured, but it’s a three-sided cliff, and has some serious gravity. It too is home to a playground and grassy areas, but its main draw is the Cloisters, a Metropolitan museum that looks like a medieval castle.

This year I finally got a Cloisters membership card, and then the pandemic hit. But my favorite part of the Cloisters isn’t the collection as much as the structure and grounds.

Inside the museum are bright courtyards and perfectly-sized terraces overlooking the Hudson River and the leaves of the park. But I most love loitering on the cobblestone driveway on a Saturday or Sunday early evening, at five, closing time. The Cloisters isn’t open right now, but one day there will again be busses picking up the final rounds of tourists, a security guard exalting in the end of another shift. That stuff makes me feel like I’m on vacation.

There’s also a nearby spot that, every time I pass through, I feel transported back to youth. It’s a garden area, shaded almost entirely by trees and shrubs and a museum wall, with a triangle of lightly trafficked paths connecting the rear of the museum to that cobblestone driveway out front. I have no idea how to capture it on camera.

The photos that interlace this post are from a July afternoon. It was very hot and partly cloudy, and there were not many people around. But I don’t want people in these photos, because although I have nothing against people, and in actuality feel happiest when other people are out enjoying the park as well, I have this sense that they, too, visit for reprieve.

These photos are, I suppose, an attempt to show a part of Manhattan that is public yet hidden. A part where, yes, we constructed the pretty flower beds and twisting paved paths and the playgrounds down below, but at least we did it on nature’s terms.

Perhaps it’s contradictory, then, that the header photo is of a water fountain. But the spout, and way the pooling water accentuates the basin’s design, are, in their own way, no less striking than the Glacial Potholes in Inwood Park. And a water fountain demonstrates, after all, our species’ imposition on our planet at its most benignly utilitarian.

Anyway, just a couple more photos. This one (below) is not from the same stroll, but from the one I took earlier that morning. Look closely. See if you can see the Triboro Bridge.

It was that photo that inspired this afternoon shoot. Something about capturing a sliver of a steel tower, miles away, through an opening in the leaves and branches. I found myself compelled, afterward, by the concept of nature framing humanity. It’s the way I imagine, or maybe just hope, the birds and squirrels see us.