My Weird Pandemic Obsession: The Mews of New York City, by Devin Kelly
The word mews is actually a singular noun, and refers to a row of old stables made or converted into apartments, particularly on a side street in a city full of busier streets. The word mew is actually a verb, and refers to the sound a cat makes when it cries. In other words, when I walk through New York City, down the long, drawn out avenues, the exaggeration of people and taxis and cars and buses and loves and wants and annoyances and desires, and come across a small street, maybe full of cobblestones, maybe, say, between 8th Street and Waverly Place, one could say I have come across a mews, and one could say that the high-pitched whine that whistles out my mouth, that longing for solitude in a world of too-much-ness, one could call that a mew.
New York City has a handful of mews, these block or half-block length tiny streets that used to be the homes of horse stables. Now, many of them are done up, made pristine and beautiful by the bourgeois, rid of the sweet smell of horse shit, the occasional old and dead soul I imagine kicked in the face by a horse’s back leg. There are the more notable ones, such as Washington Mews, which is just a block north of Washington Square Park, and then there are less notable ones, such as Sylvan Court, on 121st Street, between Lexington and 3rd. When you come across mews in New York City, you recognize them. They stand out. They resemble nothing of what exists around them. They are wide, light-filled, solitary, and seemingly-lonely, in a city that is large, extraneous, and filled too much with too much. You want to roll a cigarette, to let a pipe emerge from a daft pocket. You want a flask, a hard and tough lean, a newfound learning of the ability to wait, simply, and stop yourself from rushing. In New York City, mews are the alleys between the alleys, that lingering presence of a life before this one.
Now, in this moment of isolation, I find myself cherishing the few moments I spend outside. I walk, mask on, between the avenues, and seem to notice everything. Buildings boarded up, turrets reaching out and over stoops, the lone smoker puffing out from a top-floor window, their ass halfway between home and sky. It was on East 121st Street that I noticed a sign for Sylvan Court. It was a small street, fenced off. Wide. No cars. A few solitary bikes. I wondered if anyone lived in the homes there, and if they did, who. I saw the ghosts of horses, and their sorrow — a horse’s sorrow is a special kind — as the city grew up around them without asking their permission, or anyone’s. It made me remember wandering the Washington Mews with a cigarette in the minutes before I went to therapy, scared of my feelings and scared of the big city holding this body of mine that holds my feelings, or passing through Sylvan Terrace, further uptown, as I walked through my old neighborhood, and growing as quiet as sunlight on red brick.
New York surprises you with its history. It is as if an old family lives beneath the surfaces, pulling the curtains away, ever so slightly, from all you should have known, before some bigger family, richer, not wiser, hammered that old family down below the floorboards. I want to walk all the mews — the cats mewing between them — and remember something that had been, in order to see it as it has.
Devin Kelly is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (Civil Coping Mechanisms). He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Longreads, The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.