The Heights

I'm discovering a cool little slice of New York in historic Brooklyn Heights. I'm about to leave to go there again to study with Yoshio Kurahashi, the great shakuhachi player and teacher.

He is teaching at Dan Soergel's place on a street called Columbia Heights. It is the first (or last) street in Brooklyn, just above the BQE, hugging the cliffs to which the nabe owes it's name. That is lower Manhattan, framed and vertical, in the pic above, from last Sunday the 20th.

I say historic because it was right at the northern end of this street that old Geo. Washington himself evacuated a few thousand Revolutionary soldiers across the East River on a foggy summer's night in August of 1776.

The fateful "live to fight another day" retreat at the inevitable conclusion of the first major clash of arms - of course it would be in Brooklyn - and just a few weeks after the upstarts had held their treasonous spectacle in Congress in the sweltering heat of Philadelphia (July 4th rings a bell).