A Convent's Progress: Nuns to Artists to Luxury Rentals.

The former St. Cecilia's convent building.

As the demographic changes in Brooklyn's immigrant-turned-hipster neighborhoods continue their rapid acceleration, the buildings that once served the religious needs of immigrant communities are becoming increasingly attractive targets for land-hungry developers.

In a quick progression emblematic of the well-worn immigrants-to-artists-to-gentrificatiers arc, a Brooklyn developer recently signed a lease with the Diocese of Brooklyn for many of the peripheral buildings at St. Cecilia's Catholic Church in Greenpoint, including the former elementary school and nuns' residence, buildings which once served the neighborhood's Irish immigrant parishioners but that, for the past few years, had evolved with the neighborhood and become a center of artistic activity.

As I reported in the Times a couple years ago, the economic downturn and a visionary pastor turned St. Cecilia's, briefly, into an artsits' idyll:

At St. Cecilia’s, the decision had been made by spring 2008 to close its school. At the time, condominium buildings were springing up like glassy weeds all over Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and the diocese began marketing the school, schoolyard and other empty buildings to developers. But then the real estate market crashed, and that slice of the St. Cecilia property was no longer attractive. The pastor began thinking about a Plan B, and about the artists flooding into the neighborhood.

The result was an ad hoc arts commune, where on any given day a film shoot or two might be happening while a band rehearsed and painters, sculptors, and choreographers went about their work in classrooms-turned-studios. But the arts program was shuttered in 2012, and the church is back to plan A: as the Real Deal reported, a Brooklyn developer recently signed a 49-year lease after it was approved by a judge in January (by state law, any sale or lease of religious buildings requires court approval), with permits filed in late May. From the Real Deal:

The Williamsburg developer Seventeen Monitor LLC will pay an annual rent that starts at $1.2 million and that rises to $3.2 million in year 46, according to documents filed with the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. ... The lease covers four properties, including the former school at 17 Monitor Street, on a block shared with St. Cecilia’s. The lease started March 11 and runs through March 31, 2062, city property records filed May 28 show.... The developer has filed plans to convert two of the buildings into residential apartments, city Department of Buildings records show. The largest is the 49,685-square-foot 17 Monitor Street [the former school building], which is expected to be converted into 69 residential apartments .... The other building with conversion plans on file was 21 Monitor Street [the former convent building], a three-story building which they propose to convert to a 15-unit apartment building.

The Brooklyn Diocese has been very cautious with its properties up until this point, but this seems like a savvy move, and it will be very interesting to watch what happens over the coming years with the hundreds of other underutilized buildings it owns.

(View my photos of the art show referenced in the Times piece, and the interior of the convent building, in this flickr set.)

TREND ALERT: Backwoods Hermit-Burglars.

Hermit Christopher Knight's camp in the Maine Woods (Photo by Andy Molloy, Kennebec Journal)A week ago, the news cycle latched onto the capture of Troy Knapp, the infamous "mountain man" who'd been on the lam in southern Utah for the past seven years, living off the land and whatever he could get steal from empty vacation homes and cabins. Knapp, 45, was taken into custody Tuesday after a brief exchange of gunfire with police, who, acting on a tip from a group that had encountered the fugitive, located him in the mountains 125 miles south of Salt Lake City. (For more background on Knapp and the search to find him, I'd recommend Jacob Baynham's article in Men's Journal, Ghost in the Backcountry or Jon Billman's piece in Outside.)

A couple days later, a similar and perhaps more bizarre story emerged in Maine, with the apprehension of Christopher Knight, 47, who reportedly walked into the woods just north of the central Maine town of Rome in 1986 and has lived there ever since, rarely interacting with other people and raiding nearby vacation camps for supplies committing an estimated 1,000 burglaries over the course of nearly three decades in the woods, and he was apprehended mid-burglary.

The Kennebec Journal has the most complete version of the story of the man known as the "North Pond Hermit": 

He built a hut on a slope in the woods, where he spent his days reading books and meditating. ... There he lived: re-entering civilization only to steal supplies from camps under the cover of darkness. During those nearly three decades, he spoke just once to another person — until he was arrested during a burglary last week. ... He became so familiar for his thievery and elusiveness that he spawned the local legend of the North Pond Hermit, who for years confounded both locals and police investigating the break-ins.

Besides reading, meditating, burglary, staying out of sight (his camp was cleverly camouflaged), and listening to Rush Limbaugh on a stolen radio, Knight seems to have had few other hobbies, and virtually no social interactions. According to a Maine State Trooper: 

"He claims he hadn't had a conversation with another human being since the mid-1990s, when he encountered someone on a trail. I was the first person he talked to since the 1990s. People are like, 'No way!' But yeah, it's true."

Which left a lot of time for other activities. At his campsite, which Knight, who was caught last Thursday, led officials to on Tuesday, a State Trooper "pointed to a spot a few feet away from Kinght's tent: 'He said he's watched that mushroom grow for the last four years.'"

But even with all that meditation time, he seems not to have come any closer to understanding his own motivation, other than that he loved the book "Robinson Crusoe" as a child.

Beyond that, [Maine State Trooper] Perkins-Vance said, Knight had no deeper explanation for heading into the woods.... "He didn't give a reason," Perkins-Vance said. "He said he frequently asks himself that same question."

But in spite of the folk-hero allure of his story, certain aspects of it beggar belief: that he was able to stay in one spot, relatively close to a town, and break into the same places repeatedly without being discovered; that he didn't talk to anyone or have any help. And then there's the way he was caught, by Sgt. Terry Hughes of the Maine Warden Service, which will tarnish whatever outlaw romance survives in this tale (emphasis added): 

Hughes said he arrested Knight as he carried meat and other food from Pine Tree Camp in Rome, which serves children and adults with disabilities. ... Knight estimated he had broken into the camp more than 50 times over the years and taken thousands of dollars of meat, beer, coffee and other supplies.

It's a good thing he had access to a buffet like that, because Knight doesn't hunt and told officers that he tried fishing a couple times but found it "too much work." In all this, he's likely to come in for the same sort of criticism of his survival bona fides as Knapp has. In Knapp's case, as the Christian Science Monitor has reported, some are more inclined to see him as a cat burglar than as a modern day Davy Crockett: 

Was Knapp a true “mountain man” who felt justified in using others’ property because they were intruders on “the mountain.” Or was he a lightweight cat burglar, incapable of real bootstrap survival.

In the eyes of critics, while both Knapp and Knight displayed impressive resourcefulness, they were living off the fat at the fringes of the civilized world rather than off the land itself, making them unworthy of the survivalist or mountain man tags. Regardless of where you come out on the survival cred debate, this story can only get more interesting as more details emerge. Like this:

"He hasn's seen himself in the mirror for well over 20 years," Sgt. Hughes told the Kennebec Journal noting that he could not identify himself in a surveillance photo he was shown. "It's a very unusual situation."

Indeed.

All That Is, James Salter's new novel, Reviewed

All That Is, the new novel from James Salter, is in bookstores tomorrow, and my review essay, drawing on a lunch interview I did with the great man two years ago, has just been posted on GQ.com.

"There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real."

So reads the epigraph of James Salter's stunning new novel All That Is. For Salter, now 87, writing is a sacred act, and it is only fitting that he begins his latest novel, the capstone of his half-century-long career, by paying homage to it. "Life passes into pages," he's written elsewhere, "if it passes into anything."

And what a life, and what pages. Salter is the man many of us wish we could be—West Point grad, fighter pilot, skier, traveler, raconteur, and, from his 1957 debut novel, The Hunters, which was based on his Korean War experience flying combat missions over the Yalu, to his best books—Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime—one of the finest prose stylists and most enviable American writers of the last half century.

In All That Is, long-time fans will find a fitting addition to his canon, his powers still at full force, while those who haven't read him will find an apt introduction to a writer who remains too little known.

Read the rest of it here.

All That Is, new novel from James Salter, out Tuesday

Well this was fun: pulling James Salter's collected works down off the bookshelf to write a review of his new novel, All That Is, out Tuesday. Will post link when the review is up, but for now, here's the short version: stunning. And the man is 87 years old. An inspiration.

McConkey Film to Premier at Tribeca Film Fest

It was announced yesterday that the long-awaited documentary chronicling the life and death of skiing superstar Shane McConkey, who died after a ski-BASE jumping sequence went awry in 2009 in the Italian Dolomites, will have its world premier at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City this April. The film, which will debut in the festival's Spotlight section, was written and directed by McConkey's close friends at Matchstick Productions, the production company he was filming with in Italy at the time of his fatal jump. The film draws on some of the thousands of hours of footage the company shot with Shane, as well as interviews with all of those closest to him. It is a powerful testament to the long shadow that Shane cast over the sport, and to his enduring legacy. It is also just powerful, and merely watching the trailer had me tearing up.

I was one of the many whose lives were touched in a small but meaningful way by Shane. In 2005, he helped his good friend Miles Daisher teach me how to BASE jump. I will never forget the minute before I jumped off of the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho, so nervous I could barely breathe, looking to my left and seeing Shane, who would be jumping with me and filming, sticking his tongue out and going cross-eyed. Tension broken. A moment later, he dropped the clownish face, clapped his hand on my shoulder, and told me I was about to have the experience of my young life. He was not wrong.

I bumped into him a couple times subsequently, but it was in researching the story I wrote about his life and death for Outside in 2009 that I truly came to appreciate everything Shane had been--not just the supernaturally talented athlete or the class clown who made his thousands of friends laugh constantly (see his Saucer Boy alter ego for but one example), but the serious student and tinkerer driven by an insatiable need to push his sports--skiing and BASE-jumping--forward. From my piece:

But beneath the jester's facade was a serious ambition, an energetic mind constantly focused on innovation. From the mid-nineties on, wherever the leading edge of skiing was, there was McConkey. After winning a number of freeskiing and extreme-skiing competitions, he saw a need for more coordination in the discipline and helped found the International Free Skiers Association in 1996. In the early 2000s, he effectively reinvent­ed big-moun­tain skiing by devising the reverse-camber, reverse-sidecut powder ski. The reverse camber creates a concave rather than convex ski, while the reverse sidecut puts the fattest part of the ski underfoot rather than at the tips and tails. The combined effect keeps the rider floating over powder instead of plowing through it, allowing guys like McConkey to ski big-mountain lines faster and more aggressively. His then-sponsor, Volant, debuted the concept in 2002, after much lobbying from McConkey, with the Spatula, a ski initially scoffed at by some in the industry as looking like a water ski. When McConkey switched over to K2 in 2004, "his first meeting here, he came up and brought a pair of Spatulas and told us what they were and why we needed to pay attention to this new technology," recalls Mike Gutt, then the K2 team manager. A year later, K2 had its first prototype, and in 2006 the K2 Pontoons hit the market. Now nearly every ski maker has a similar model in its lineup.

"I don't think it's melodramatic to call him a visionary," Gaffney says. "He saw things other people didn't, and he saw that he had the skills to pull them off and wanted to be the first to try."

Innovation is rewarded in any field, which is why you find the most talented practitioners always at the forefront, pushing into the unknown. In McConkey's world, the risks were simply much higher: One mistake could kill him.

For all those reasons and many more, Shane won't soon be forgotten, and I'm glad this documentary is getting a bigger stage and the chance to reach a broader, more mainstream audience.

New Year's Resolutions, Woody Guthrie Style.

Woody's resolutions. Click for bigger version. For those in search of inspiration in crafting a list of New Year's resolutions, check out Woody Guthrie's 1942 list, which runs the gamut from the practical (2: Work by a schedule) to the simple (4: Shave) and sensible (5: Take Bath), to the whimsical (26: Dance Better), and, finally, the aspirational (20: Dream Good; 31: Love Everybody; 32: Make Up Your Mind; 33: Wake up and Fight). Something there for everyone, I'm sure. Happy New Year.

[Via LA Times]

Online: Big Rock Candy Mountains

My piece from December's Skiing Magazine, on the remote Tushar Mountains in southern Utah, is now available online. Read it here. 

The Mystery Machine: preferred transport at southern Utah's Eagle Point resort.

Your Fishmonger is Lying to You (Maybe)

The real thing: Wild King/Chinook Salmon, Bristol Bay, AK (2010)Maybe not intentionally, but the end result is the same: no matter how conscientious a consumer you try to be, you're often not getting the fish you think you are. Seafood supply chains are notoriously opaque and alarmingly difficult to trace; always have been. Which means that buying seafood, even at reputable vendors, is a potential minefield, and since well-meaning merchants and restaurants are often duped by their suppliers, it's hard to know exactly where in that chain to assign blame. But at least now the problem is being brought to light, with a piece in today's NY Times highlighting a new study (PDF) in NYC by marine conservation group Oceana that used DNA tests to determine whether fish were actually what vendors claimed. The results, as summarized by the Times:

The researchers, from the conservation group Oceana, said that genetic analyses showed that 39 percent of nearly 150 samples of fresh seafood collected from 81 establishments in the city this summer were mislabeled. ... In some cases, cheaper types of fish were substituted for expensive species. In others, fish that consumers have been urged to avoid because stocks are depleted, putting the species or a fishery at risk, was identified as a type of fish that is not threatened. ... Some of the findings present public health concerns. Thirteen types of fish, including tilapia and tilefish, were falsely identified as red snapper. Tilefish contains such high mercury levels that the federal Food and Drug Administration advises women who are pregnant or nursing and young children not to eat it.

Additional results of note: all 16 of the sushi venues surveyed sold at least one mislabeled fish, and 94 percent of fish sold as white tuna was in fact "snake mackerel, or escolar, which contains a toxin that can cause severe diarrhea if more than a few ounces of meat are ingested."

To me, the results are not shocking at all--anyone who knows a bit about seafood supply chains probably suspected this was the case--but what is pleasantly surprising is seeing a group finally go to the trouble and expense of doing a DNA-based study to prove just how little we know about the fish we eat.

One result of particular interest to me, but which was not mentioned in the Times piece: the prevalence of misrepresenting farmed salmon as wild caught. There are few things I would say I'm an expert in, but salmon is one of them, and over the years, I've found myself in more than a few arguments with waiters and fishmongers regarding the salmon they're selling, with fish labeled as wild Pacific Salmon looking/tasting suspiciously like farmed Atlantic salmon. So it comes as something of a vindication to read this, from the original report (emphasis added):

Fraudulent salmon was most often Atlantic salmon being substituted for wild salmon. Wild Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, is all but commercially extinct, but Pacific salmon is almost entirely wild- caught.... In a few cases, one type of wild salmon was substituted for another (Coho for sockeye and vice versa). However, fish substituted for king salmon (the most expensive salmon species) were all farmed Atlantic salmon.

With consumers getting more and more curious about where their food comes from, and with studies like this one coming out more frequently, the seafood industry is going to need to find a way to address their supply chain problem. It won't be easy.

Newsstand Alert: Eagle Point Story in December issue of Skiing Mag

"In the Big Rock Candy Mountains," my story chronicling my March trip to southern Utah's Tushar Mountains, is out now, in the December issue of Skiing Magazine. The purpose of the trip was twofold: to investigate the re-opening of the long-shuttered Elk Meadows ski area, now reincarnated as  Eagle Point; and to tour some blissfully uncrowded backcountry with Tushar Mountain Tours.

The story hasn't made its way online yet, but I urge you to pick up a copy at a newstand or Barnes and Noble--I know, hopelessly retrograde. To entice you, above is the opening spread, with photo by Kevin Winzeler, and here's the lede:

“Nothing left to ski.” It was St. Patrick’s Day, my second day at Eagle Point, a small ski resort in southwestern Utah’s in- frequently visited Tushar Mountains. The lean snow year meant bad spring conditions and thin cover on what was already lim- ited terrain—1,500 vertical feet, with 40 runs and five lifts spread over 600 acres. So I’d taken to the journalistic equivalent of talking to myself: scribbling my dejection in my notebook. “Today is fine, but what am I going to do with two more days here?”

The hill, formerly known as Elk Meadows, is tucked away in the Fishlake National Forest, occupying a high meadow and plunging canyon 18 miles east of the town of Beaver, a waypoint roughly halfway between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, three and a half hours from each. It opened in 1971, catering mostly to a regional clientele, and though it seemed like a place with big potential, it always struggled. Over its first 30 years, it ran through a succession of six owners and a few bankruptcies. Then, from 2002 to 2010, it was shuttered while a rotating cast of investors attempted to turn it into a private resort on the model of the Yellowstone Club. One investor in that scheme, known as the Mount Holly Club, was a New York hedge fund called Xe Capital. When the club plan imploded in 2008, several of Xe’s principals, led by a Michigander named Shane Gadbaw, bought the resort at auction and hustled to reopen it for the 2010–2011 season as Eagle Point.

The Elk Meadows saga is a classic tale of the American West, full of hucksters and charlatans, entrepreneurs and escapists, big dreams and big mountains and big failures, with the possibility of redemption at the end of it all. I’d come to investigate the resort’s reopening and answer a pretty basic question: Was Gadbaw, now 37, just another dreamer lured West with visions of grandeur, or did this place really have a shot?

The answer (spoiler alert!): I think so, but my opinion was certainly influenced by the blizzard that blew in during my stay there and and yielded endless fresh tracks for my final two days there. (For shots of the powder bonanza, check out my Tushars flickr set here.)

 

Update on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 at 12:27PM by Tim Sohn

And the piece is now available online at Skiing's website here. Enjoy. 

Alaska: Future Swing State?

Blue Alaska?

Regular readers will know that I've been spending a lot of time in Alaska the past five years, and I've often had discussions with born-and-bred Alaskan friends about the political future of the state and about whether an influx of "new Alaskans" coupled with generational shifts in attitudes might change the state's political calculus. In particular, on resource issues like the one I've been researching, the Pebble Mine, it seemed to me that Alaskan attitudes were changing rapidly, especially in the urban population centers where the majority of Alaskans live (half of Alaska's population lives in the Anchorage area alone).

Consider the hunch verified: writing yesterday on his 538 blog over at the New York Times, pundit wizard-king Nate Silver noted that the Democratic nominee has been losing by gradually slimmer margins in the Presidential elections, from Gore losing by 31 percentage points in 2000 to Obama losing by 22 points in 2008--in spite of running against Alaska Governor Sarah Palin--and then by just 14 points this year. (The 2004 election, though not mentioned by Silver, conforms to the trend, with Kerry losing to Bush by 26 points.) And Silver's research seems to bear out my anecdotal observations on population: 

Alaska’s population is also changing; between 2010 and 2011, Alaska had the third-highest population growth rate in the country, trailing only Texas and Utah.

Where are those new Alaskans coming from? Many are from liberal states on the West Coast. Between 2005 and 2009, about 4,300 Californians moved to Alaska per year, making it the top state for domestic emigration to Alaska. So did 4,200 residents per year from Washington and 2,200 from Oregon.

But because of the state's dependence on the oil and gas industries, Alaska, Silver says, is likely to remain conservative on economic and resource issues, and vote conservative because of them, at least for the time being.  

But a Democrat who was perceived as being of the center-left or the libertarian left, especially one from a western state like Colorado’s governor, John W. Hickenlooper, could conceivably be competitive in Alaska. And if Alaska continues to add population from states like California and Washington, it could be competitive on a more regular basis in 2020 and going forward.

Stranger things have happened, and I'm certainly not going to argue with Nate Silver.