The statue of a Buddhist monk, on Riverside Drive, used to be in Japan, about a mile from where the bomb that is the focus of “Oppenheimer” hit.
Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a statue in Manhattan that was a witness to the official beginning of the nuclear age. We’ll also see why buoys are back at Brighton Beach — and why swimmers are safer.
Last week we looked at a few places in Manhattan with connections to the Manhattan Project, the sprawling, secret wartime effort to develop atomic bombs that is at the center of the film “Oppenheimer.”
There are others, like a onetime car dealer and garage on Broadway at West 133rd Street that figured in one part of the race to produce enriched uranium. Another has a connection that might seem less direct: a statue on Riverside Drive, 18 blocks from the apartment house where J. Robert Oppenheimer grew up.
The statue was not placed in the gardenlike space next to 331 Riverside Drive until the mid-1950s, after Oppenheimer’s past had been questioned and his security clearance taken away — the demise of a once-brilliant career, which the movie examined.
The statue’s connection to Oppenheimer and the nuclear age is that it survived Hiroshima.
It was “about a mile from where the bomb hit,” said the Rev. Gary Jaskula of the New York Buddhist Church, which owns the building on Riverside Drive. “That’s why it has those strange colorations” — orange bands where the bronze had been singed. After it arrived in New York, rumors circulated that it had brought along radioactivity. Children even held their breath as they walked by.
The statue is a larger-than-life figure of Shinran Shonin, a Japanese Buddhist monk whose 90 years on earth straddled the 12th and 13th centuries.
“That’s Shinran in travel clothes,” Jaskula said. “That’s why he has his hat on.” Shinran had been exiled by the emperor but was “lower nobility,” he said.
Jaskula said the statue was one of several statues of Shonin cast in the 1930s and sent to temples in Japan. In the 1950s it was offered to the United Nations as a symbol of world peace. The U.N. could not find a place for it. The church volunteered to give it a home, and it was moved into the garden beside the church’s turn-of-the-last-century townhouse, once the home of Marion Davies, the actress and mistress of the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst.
The statue belongs in New York because “New York is one of the places where many of the people who developed the bomb were from,” Jaskula said. “You know, the Manhattan Project. That’s the association people have with it. For us, it’s a message of peace.”
The church was established in 1938 and was the first Buddhist religious institution chartered in New York State. It eventually acquired the townhouse for an academy, an outpost of its main location in the West 90s. Jaskula said the church moved to Riverside Drive when the other location was cleared for urban renewal.
“Right now,” he said, “it’s ‘Wow, the neighborhood is so beautiful” on Riverside Drive, in contrast to the vibe when the church arrived. “At that time, it was sort of a dicey neighborhood. That’s the only reason we could afford it.”
Jaskula said he had seen “Oppenheimer.” It “really showed his complexity,” and for someone born in the 1950s, it brought up “all the associations I grew up with in the time of McCarthy.”
“You see how silly that was,” he said, “and we’re kind of going that way again.”
He officiated at the church’s annual service on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6. But he mentioned the Sept. 11 attacks. By coincidence, the statue had been dedicated on an earlier Sept. 11, in 1955. And in 2001, the jetliners on the way to the World Trade Center “flew right by,” he said.
“That statue has seen some bad things,” he said. “It calls us to be a better self, to choose something higher. I think that was the meaning for the people in Hiroshima. That is what we hope people take from it when they see it today.”
“It’s where it’s been, what it’s seen,” he said. “That’s the significance.”
Weather
Mostly sunny today, with temperatures near 90. Mostly cloudy at night, with temps reaching the mid-60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Sept. 4 (Labor Day).
The latest New York news
Migrant shelter scrutiny: The city gave DocGo contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to care for migrants. Now it faces problems, including a police investigation into two allegations of sexual assault at migrant shelters it runs upstate.
Cyclones on top: This summer, the pro baseball team with the best record in New York City isn’t the Yankees or the Mets. It’s the Brooklyn Cyclones, who are now leading their minor league division.
Obituaries
Trailblazing judge: Rosemary S. Pooler, a lifelong champion of consumer rights who broke barriers by becoming the first woman to serve as a state and federal judge in two upstate New York districts, died on Aug. 10. She was 85.
Acclaimed architect: Thierry Despont, the French architect and designer who restored landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, the Woolworth Building and the Ritz Paris, died on Aug. 13. He was 75.
How the buoy barrier came back
Capri Djatiasmoro had witnessed firsthand the trouble that small craft can cause when they go too close to the shore: Four Jet Skis ran over a friend who was swimming off Brighton Beach.
He ended up with 10 staples in his head, and Djatiasmoro decided to do everything she could to protect swimmers.
A state law says that boats and motorized water scooters must stay at least 500 feet from the shore, but without floating markers in the water, it can be hard to tell where the 500-foot line of demarcation is.
There was once a string of buoys to separate the swimmers from the boaters, but it had long since disappeared. The Parks Department maintained that putting buoys back could draw swimmers farther out than they should go.
In time Djatiasmoro turned her quest for buoys into a do-it-yourself project. She got a noncommercial permit to put out lobster traps, although the buoys she is responsible for are not actually attached to any traps. The buoys, weighed down by cinder blocks, are made and installed by Jozef Koppelman, a Brooklyn diver.
Matthew Fermin, the owner of a ski rental and tour company at Rockaway Beach, said everyone should be in favor of them.
“It’s not a big deal to put them up, and it’s an easy way to keep people at a distance, so why not?” he said. “The Statue of Liberty has buoys around it that say ‘Don’t go past this mark,’ so why can’t the beaches? There isn’t even anybody swimming near the Statue of Liberty.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Grand piano
Dear Diary:
It didn’t make sense for my partner and me to be renting such a big apartment. We both had beginning jobs and little money. Still, the location, on 54th Street off Lexington Avenue, was nice. But how would we furnish it? The living-dining room alone was 30 feet long.
“I’ll leave the piano during your lease,” the landlord offered. My partner and I had been admiring the magnificent ebony grand with its exquisite carved legs. It was the focus of the otherwise empty room.
It’s a deal, we said.
Neither one of us played, but we loved the piano. When we moved a few years later, we left an awning we had installed on the terrace and took the piano.
The elevator at the West Village building we moved into couldn’t fit a grand piano. We watched, biting our nails, as our handsome instrument was lifted slowly up the side of the building to the 16th floor, where it was guided into the living room, which felt quite a bit smaller once the piano was in place.
From there it was onto an apartment 15 blocks away, where the huge piano must have consumed 40 percent of the room, with sofa and chairs squeezed in around it.
Then we decided to move out of the city and sublet. After clearing the place out, one item remained: the piano.
The tenant we chose was a young man who played the piano and, short of furniture as we had been years ago, was happy to have one that took up 40 percent of the room.
— Vincent Burke
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Morgan Malget and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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2023-08-21 04:09:23Z
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