A tree grows in Chelsea

Recently, during one of our late night (here)/mid-morning (there) conversations, Nalin mentioned that he was reading a lot during this trip to India. His current infatuation is Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, who is married to Sally Singer, the former fashion news and features director at Vogue, who is now the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. A couple of years ago, almost to the day, The Selby, one of our favorite photo sites, published images of the couple's apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, which they share with their three sons. Tonight I found myself looking closely at those images and browsing around to read more about Ms. Singer and her family (even though Nalin has been urging me to read about her for a long time now). One blog has a conversation with her discussing her favorite heirloom, a mid-century metal table with figures from the Sistine Chapel etched onto the face of it. Her sons have claimed their spots next to their favorite figures. She goes on to explain how she lives with this heirloom:

"As you enter our house and go down a hallway, you’re immediately in our kitchen, which opens into our living room. The table is one of the first things you see. It sort of defines the center of how we live because we’re always at that table. We eat on it every single day. Anyone who comes in and sits at it, looks down and smiles because they see a funny little face staring up at them. I’ve really come to appreciate it."

This is an absolutely lovely passage, and I appreciate that Ms. Singer, with what must be her vast knowledge and access to treasures of such distinction in her profession would choose an object of supposedly ordinary, daily family significance as one of her most priceless possessions.

Last summer, our family was in New York for a little over a week, house-sitting for friends who live on West 23rd Street, just two short blocks west of the Chelsea Hotel. Each day I found myself strolling past this hotel with my two young sons in tow. At night, I sat curled on the living room couch devouring stories of the legends of the Chelsea Hotel from a book by the same title on the shelves of our friends. It occurred to me that in this concrete jungle that is especially Chelsea, this hotel emerges from the earth and its surroundings like a tree, with years of growth and witness to everything both inside and out, broadly spreading into the sky, yet breathing in both the earth and the air around it, through its ironed balconies. There is a book we love by Tara Publishers in India called One, Two, Tree! that is at its core a counting book, and through its simple and colorful line drawings shows the tree growing with numbers of creatures one by one. A sort of Noah's ark of nature. This is how the Chelsea Hotel seems to me, drawing in such a vast array of individuals and families like Sally Singer's, whose children must run through the long corridors like squirrels on their branches. Mr. O'Neill and Ms. Singer have chosen to build their nest at the Chelsea, which has to be at times both hospitable and inhospitable to a growing family. And this is to me the beauty of it all.

There is an architectural concept of building a structure like a tree, paying attention to light and shadow, shelter and sustainability (and other important elements, of course), but I believe that this is actually a very organic metaphor without even trying. A building becomes a tree over time by its very existence through the people who live within it, regardless of its original intent. In other words, it is what inhabits a thing that makes it unique and dynamic. Perhaps three young children sitting year after year at their favored spots around a treasured kitchen table exemplifies this in the most profound and harmonious way.